Slam
Caught between two warring gangs about to go at it in the prison yard, Ray
Joshua (Saul Williams) does what he does best: opens his mouth and lets the rap
muse speak. His incantatory, jagged poem stills the savage breasts, and Marc
Levin's idealistic Slam, for the moment at least, stills the cynicism of
the most hardened critics. Preposterous though it may be, Ray's Orpheus-like
outpouring does seem to vindicate the redemptive power of art -- even though
Levin renders the inner-city reality from which it springs with a shaky,
cinéma-vérité hysteria. As subtle as its title, sometimes
fatuous in its earnestness and a little too rose-colored for its own good,
Slam nonetheless offers a genuine tribute to the power of the
imagination.
To get to that point, though, you have to accept the drug-dealing Ray as a
neighborhood shaman who buys ice cream for the kids on the street when he's not
selling weed or writing a love poem so local kingpin Big Mike (Lawrence Wilson)
can charm his new squeeze. When Big Mike gets whacked, Ray is picked up and
booked for possession, and his stay in the joint with feuding gangstas is
further confused by creative-writing teacher Lauren Bell (Sonja Sohn), who
urges him to participate in a poetry slam. Their relationship is tortured and
superficial, but the generous amount of time Levin allows real-life slam poets
Williams and Sohn to strut their stuff more than redeems the picture's generic
lapses.
-- Peter Keough
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