‘Chi-Raq’ Is as Insane as You'd Expect a Spike Lee Musical About Gun Violence to Be

Long a prominent chronicler of the black American experience in films like Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), and Get on the Bus (1996), Spike Lee has now turned his attention to a pressing social issue: gun violence. It' s a national concern—horrifying instances occur on a daily basis—but in his latest "joint," the impassioned, iridescent musical comedy Chi-Raq, Lee localizes his story in one of the nation's most affected areas: Chicago's predominantly African-American South Side.

More than a few Chicagoans reacted with horror to the racy, exuberant first trailer, worried that Lee, a New Yorker (and thus an interloper) was trivializing a serious issue. In a dismaying sign of our times, writers trashed the film in hyperventilating op-eds before they, or anyone, had seen it. Lee is no stranger to this type of controversy: Back in 1989, pundits, including conservative columnist Joe Klein, erroneously fretted that his masterpiece Do the Right Thing would provoke riots among young African-American moviegoers.

In Chi-Raq's case, a plainly irritated Lee responded by cutting an unrepresentative, morose trailer prefaced by a stony-faced message in which he stressed that his film was deadly serious, and satirical. (This was a curious case of life imitating art: At the start of Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled, the main character explains the meaning of satire to the audience—did Lee figure he'd ever need to do the same?) Lee also flatly rejected requests from the likes of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to change the title, a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq coined by locals to connote the area's warzone-like volatility.

Chi-Raq also happens to be the name of the character portrayed by Nick Cannon, into whose coiled, muscular frame the tragedy, violence, and aspirations of the city are sublimated. Chi-Raq's both a talented, aspiring rapper and the leader of the purple-clad Spartans gang. Their bitter rivals, the orange-decked Trojans, are presided over by Cyclops (an eyepatch-sporting Wesley Snipes, who gives a curious performance that veers from mumbly to tittering). " Pray 4 My City," the Cannon-performed rap track that opens the film, sets a rueful, angry tone. In a possible nod to the iconic 1987 video for Prince's " Sign O the Times," its lyrics are forcefully imposed in blood-red font across a jet-black screen as they're spit out by Cannon: "Too much hate in my city / Too many heartaches in my city / But I got faith in my city."

As you may have already heard, Chi-Raq's eyebrow-raising plot is an audaciously faithful update of Aristophanes's bawdy 411 BC play Lysistrata, in which the eponymous character persuades her fellow women to withhold sex from their partners so that they will stop the Peloponnesian War. Here, the killing of a young girl by a stray bullet is the catalyst for a sex strike led by Chi-Raq's girlfriend Lysistrata, played with magnetic charisma by Dear White People's Teyonah Parris. As the strike intensifies, tempers fray, balls go blue, politicians get involved, and hijinks ensue.

In the context of Lee's career, Chi-Raq is a paradox: It's both like nothing he's done before and a comprehensive compendium of his myriad, long-standing stylistic tics and thematic obsessions. One on hand, the gulf between his grave subject matter and his unorthodox cinematic delivery has never been more profound, nor challenging. He's made one musical—campus showdown School Daze (1988)—but its gaudy exuberance was well-suited to its tale of spunky students at war and play. His diagnostic, New York–set drug drama Clockers (1995), meanwhile, was characterized by its somber visual and tonal approach, save for the occasional stylistic flourish.

In attempting to balance tragedy with fun in Chi-Raq, Lee throws a lot at the wall, hoping it'll stick. It makes for a rather odd viewing experience: One minute there's a lump in our throat as we watch a grieving mother (Jennifer Hudson) mopping up the blood of her dead child; the next we're faced with a bug-eyed strip-club proprietor (Dave Chappelle) hollering about how "these hos"—the strikers—"have literally shut down the penis power grid!" Such transitions are far from smooth, but Lee deserves credit for venturing that the rude juxtaposition of ribald comedy and deep sadness are endemic to the urban black experience.

Chi-Raq is also a Brechtian overload, forcing the viewer to recognize its artificiality (spectacularly stylized, color-coded costumes and set design) while simultaneously flashing its documentary cred. After its Cannon-rap opening, a torrent of onscreen statistics about gun violence flood the screen, followed by a stentorian voiceover about life on the streets from real-life Chicago pastor Father Michael Pfleger, a version of whom is played in the film by John Cusack. Next we're introduced to the nattily dressed Dolemedes (Samuel L. Jackson), a one-man chorus who contextualizes the narrative in gleeful monologues delivered straight into the camera. (The role recalls his turn as community focal point DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing .) The vast majority of the film's dialogue is delivered in rhyming verse, with mixed results. For every wryly funny couplet, there's one that sounds pulled straight from the "My First Rap" songbook: "Da Greek Aristophanes penned a play satirizin' his day / And in the style of his time, ' Stophanes made dat shit rhyme!"

Although Chi-Raq's source material is centuries old, Lee (and co-writer Kevin Willmott) make a concerted effort to establish its immediacy. They freight the script with references to recent incidents of racism in action, including mentions of George Zimmerman, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and even Dylann Roof, perpetrator of the Charleston church massacre in June this year. It's admirably urgent stuff, but there's little sense of a consistent ideology underpinning Chi-Raq beyond its general despair at the existence of gun violence.

One long eulogy bellowed by Cusack' s Pfleger-proxy lays out an impressive social critique that situates gang violence and police brutality within a wider context of economic underdevelopment and structural racism. The speech is a crucial rejoinder to simplistic notions of "black-on-black crime," but the sequence feels awkwardly divorced from the wider narrative. Elsewhere, Lee appears to both decry pernicious " pull up your pants" respectability politics (in the form of a pompous black city official played by Harry Lennix) while simultaneously embracing them: Chi-Raq literally pulls up his pants at one point, and there are references in the script to a "self-inflicted genocide." The film's sexual politics are also confounding. Chi-Raq is refreshing, particularly in the context of buttoned-down Hollywood cinema, for its frank depiction of sex as a basic human need and a source of great enjoyment. But this is counterbalanced by the creeping, laugh-squelching feeling—not helped by Lee's seriously patchy record on sexual politics (see the dubious lesbian-impregnation comedy She Hate Me)—that the director genuinely sees the sex strike as a viable real-life solution. He has since said as much in a recent interview; an opinion brusquely dismantled by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a sharp article for the Atlantic; Coates compares the idea to asking women to stop wearing short skirts in order to avoid being raped. Lee has also satirized wild male sexual thirst more effectively in a single montage in his debut She's Gotta Have It (1986) than he does here, cartoonishly.

Ultimately though, for Chi-Raq's shortcomings, it's a joy to once again experience Lee, a master stylist and true artist, let loose on a subject he's passionate about, while backed with a sizable budget ( $15 million by Amazon Studios, their first production). Lee's last three films—a desperately limp studio remake of Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy sandwiched between wispy, micro-budget doodles (Red Hook Summer, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus)—have conveyed a worrying sense of creative stagnation. Now Lee is unequivocally back in the spotlight, making the kind of full-blooded, confrontational, frustrating, and topical film only he can.

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Chi-Raq is now playing on theaters nationwide.