Hustle & Flow
Amazing film reveals shared humanity in a hip-hop tale

DJay is a pimp. He has a small stable of girls working for him, and he sells drugs to supplement his income.

I don't know what kind of image that puts into your head, but if you are familiar with the gangsta rap flavor of the musical world called hip-hop, you might be envisioning that DJay is a smooth, impossibly cool cat in a plush crib full of adoring and anonymous plushy-doll chicks just dying to do his bidding; he's in complete control of his little empire, just as depicted in a million bad MTV videos.

I say that you might be envisioning that because that was the first image that came to me when I first heard of the film's premise about a pimp who tries to become a rap artist.

But Hustle & Flow is a much more thoughtful and nuanced film than one might expect, and right from the start writer and director Craig Brewer takes all those cheap video cliche expectations and topples them over. DJay may be a pimp, and he does have a small stable of girls working for him, and he does sell drugs, but there is nothing glamorous at all about his lifestyle. He is strictly small-time, low-rent, and he knows it, but he also takes a little bit of pride in the fact that he's not fooling himself. At least he is surviving the best he knows how, at least give him credit for that.

Set in a Memphis that is perpetually humid and sweaty, "Hustle & Flow" depicts a city still just a half-step removed from the sweltering roadhouses that gave birth to the blues. There may be a modern core to the city, but DJay's life is lived at the city's relatively unchanged fringe, where some kind of music can always be heard like a constant insect thrum droning away in the background, a droning that DJay would love to take part in.

When someone decides to pursue a dream, it can be amazing sometimes how the universe will suddenly bring weird coincidences into play. So it is with DJay; in quick succession, his dream is unlocked by a chance meeting with an old high school chum who has parlayed his old electronic wizardry into a humble living from small recording gigs. That night, when a junky trades an old Casio keyboard to DJay for drugs just minutes after DJay learns that Skinny Black, a famous rap star with whom DJay was very remotely acquainted during high school, is returning to Memphis on the Fourth of July, the message from the universe to DJay is clear: better get cracking on those songs.

Enlisting the aid of Key, who brings in a skinny white kid, Shelby, to operate the drum machine, the trio build their first song literally out of thin air and some hastily scrawled lyrics by DJay who surprisingly seems least attuned to the inner-rhythm of his words. It's a thrilling sequence that reminded me — don't laugh — of the scene in Amadeus when Mozart and Salieri get caught up in Mozart's deathbed dictation of his Requiem. "Whomp That Trick" may not be Mozart, but its creation is spawned from that same mysterious pool that all creative acts draw on, and watching the song build from a few dull drum beats into something that is undeniably primal and pure if nothing else.

But DJay's road to success is not a smooth one. Once again Brewer's script blasts cannon-size holes in the rags-to-riches genre cliches by playing up some of DJay's negative qualities; it's not easy to root for him when his behavior sometimes exhibits as being so coldly self-serving. He throws one of his girl's out onto the stoop one night, along with her infant son, and in order to get a microphone he can't afford, he pimps out Nola, his top working girl, in a way that clearly violates her in a way that all her other tricks couldn't possibly touch her. She may be a prostitute, she tells him, but she's not just his cash machine to be used as he will.

In "Hustle and Flow," audience sympathy for the hero is not granted but earned. There are a lot of reasons not to like DJay, but eventually Terrence Howard, who plays DJay, eventually does earn our sympathy. Howard delivers a masterful performance that should definitely be remembered come Oscar time. I never caught him in a moment of making actorly "choices" in a scene; he is not acting DJay, he IS DJay. And as DJay pursues his music, becomes a little more confident in his ability, he actually becomes less ambitious in a way; he relaxes and opens up and becomes more generous in his life. In pursuing his dream, even if selfishly at first, his energy can't help but rub off on the people around him, who find new vistas in their own lives to explore.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, with some Oscar worthy nods among them as well. Taryn Manning, as Nola, finds depth in her characterization of a prostitute who, worse than DJay, never seems to have had any kind of dream at all. Taraji P. Henson as Shug, DJay's very pregnant girlfriend, turns from a reclusive creature who seems to be peering out at the world from a dense fog into a woman who seems to be aware of herself and her hidden powers for the first time. DJ Qualls is a visual delight alone as the ultra-skinny white kid who may be the hippest "black guy" in the room, and real rap star Ludacris bravely takes the part of Skinny Black, a character who has devolved into something that someone Ludicrous might fear becoming himself, someone who has lost touch with the streets that breathed life and passion into him until he is reduced to a self-important walking cliche of his own persona.

Does DJay achieve his dream? Is his dream even the same at the end of the film? Suffice it to say that Brewer's last defiant salvo at the rags-to-riches genre has plenty of other plot twists up its sleeves with a conclusion that is both open-ended and satisfying. "Hustle and Flow" is one of the summer's biggest and most satisfying surprises, full of energy, truth, passion and drive.