Hustle & Flow
Studio: Paramount Classics
Rated: R
Website: http://www.hustleandflow.com/
Release Date: 2005-07-22
Cast: Terrence Dashon Howard, DJ Qualls, Ludacris, Anthony Anderson, Taryn Manning
Director: Craig Brewer
Screenwriter: Craig Brewer
WorkNameSort: Hustle & Flow
Our Rating: 3.50
For a movie so frequently slapdash, Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow boasts an embarrassment of Bests. Best garage-band movie ever. Best movie about family where nobody is related by anything as unimportant as blood. And the best Best of all Best movie about total screw-ups that doesn’t find answers in violence. A slight stumble into traditional American movie-action tropes is quickly remedied by a last reel of screw-you-if-you-can’t-deal-with-it optimism.
It doesn’t start promisingly. We see a penny-ante hustler (Terrence Dashon Howard), ludicrously named DJay, giving a pimp-style empowerment pep talk to Nola (Taryn Manning), a slow blond burnout he whores out from inside his battered Chevy somewhere in the Shitsville section of Memphis. But DJay’s a poor excuse for a mack daddy, and his relationship with his tattered string of prostitutes including pregnant, trauma-eyed Shug (Taraji P. Henson) and persistently pissed Lexus (Paula Jai Parker) is that of a semideadbeat dad in a co-/interdependent family.
They’re all going nowhere slowly until DJay happens to acquire a Casio synth and meets up with a high-school pal (Anthony Anderson) who’s also a recording engineer. With the addition of Shelby (DJ Qualls), a soda machine installer who moonlights as a programmer (“Anyone tell him he a white man?” DJay asks), the trio sets about turning DJay’s dilapidated row house into a recording studio.
Brewer loves documenting the minutiae of lo-fi, first-time creation: Shelby plucking at his crap Roland sequencer; Anderson’s Key moving his mixer faders like a high priest at his altar; DJay rapping into a mike he seems afraid will bite his lip off. After their amateurish, kinda sucky but totally catchy demo is finished, DJay preps for a possibly career-making meet-up with bling-blinded rapper Skinny Black (Ludacris). But the rickety Rocky tale is mainly an armature on which Brewer’s crew hangs one solid-gold thespian moment after another. Howard’s DJay is unforgettable, a haunted lost soul with a slowly emerging transcendent streak. Henson has a film-stealing highlight when her nearly mute Shug hears her first vocal replayed and her face melts from its natural state of terror to childlike glee. Manning (who played anonymous support to Eminem in 8 Mile) crafts her Nola as a sort of ‘ho Lenny to DJay’s George; her stuttery trashing of him late in the film is an earned tear-jerker and an effective one-scene upbraiding of the pimp-‘ho mythos. And while Brewer’s narrative is somewhat slack, and he isn’t going to win any awards for camera movement or composition, his film, like his poverty-stunned strivers, grows progressively lovable despite (and perhaps because of) its flaws.
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2005.