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It owes much to the 70s black underground cinema. The cinema that produced films like Foxy Brown or Shaft, Hustle & Flow is the spiritual child to the Blaxploitation genre. And beyond that, it’s a tale of the liberating power of music, a grassroots story of a man taking every intense feeling he has in his life and filtering into one song. It’s a shame that this came out in 2005, an incredibly competitive year for Best Actor (with a seemingly preordained win for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and featuring such stiff competition as Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix), because Terrence Howard’s lead role is an intense, complicated portrait of a man struggling with his own nature.
Howard plays DJay, a Memphis pimp, frequently sweating, haunted and tired around the eyes, slouching, but with a burning desire to rise above it. Writer/director Craig Brewer gives Howard a stylized dialog to play with, but these monologues contain a kind of street poetry to them. This a deeply conflicted and complicated man, one with an innate intelligence and creativity, one who could possibly run a business or be a great success if he had access to greater opportunity. It’s easy to simplify someone as a “pimp” or “drug dealer” and forget that they’re a person, or that these weren’t their chosen professions but possibly the only ones readily available to them. Hustle & Flow humanizes its subject, and reveals an antihero of depth. Howard’s performance takes what was already on the page and blasts it into orbit. In another year it would be easy to see him making a clean sweep come awards season, he’s just that good.
Hustle & Flow is a great first two acts, and a problematic third. After getting us to care about this man’s plight, to root for him to try and succeed, and witnessing Taraji P. Henson’s character find a strength and relevance through the music (a minor miracle of acting is to watch the way her face illuminates from within when she hears herself played back for the first time), we’re thrown into an ultra-violent ending that feels slightly sour to everything else. Hustle & Flow is at its best when it focuses in on the redemptive power of art, and proves that amongst the human condition there is one defining emotion that unites us all: hope.
