The latest film from Spike Lee sounds like the wrong kind of trouble. Working with cowriter Kevin Willmott, the great man winds a multigenre musical – there are bits of hip-hop, R&B, gospel and plastic soul here – around a contemporary version of Aristophanes's Lysistrata. The actors speak largely in rhyming couplets. The film ends up as a call for love and understanding. You know? The sort of thing you endure tolerantly in workshop form at your local community theatre.
Shut up. Chi-Raq sparks with more irresistible energy than any Lee joint in the past decade. We might have hoped for a little more plot. Some of the wilder diversions lead towards longueurs. But this endlessly generous film reminds us there are many worse things than excess.
The title, a conflation of “Chicago” and “Iraq”, communicates the absurd levels of violence that plague that thrilling midwestern city. Young black people were safer dodging IEDs in the rougher corners of Fallujah. The film throws us straight into a typical orgy of destruction that leads to the death of a young child. Enough should be enough, but enough is never quite enough.
Appalled by the continuing mayhem, a powerful, statuesque young woman named, yes, Lysistrata (the magnificent Teyonah Parris) comes up with a scheme to force the warring parties towards compromise. The women in the community will withhold sex until something like peace breaks out. The catchy slogan "No peace, no piece" is soon everywhere. By the close, the whole world has joined in. Chi-Raq is nothing if not ambitious.
Before we get there, Lysistrata has to confront antagonists and reassure supporters. Her boyfriend, Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), named proudly for the compound noun, is incandescent with fury. Two resistant, bereaved mothers from different generations (the untouchable Angela Bassett and the empathetic Jennifer Hudson) see whispers of hope in her strategy. This is very much a women’s movie.
Aristophanes's durable scenario has been recycled at least once in recent years. But Chi-Raq annihilates all memories of Radu Mihaileanu's comparatively gutless The Source.
Every scene is stuffed with visual invention. When Lysistrata and her crew go to negotiate with women from the rival gang, the contrast between the home team’s purple livery and the away squad’s orange is played to delicious effect. Samuel L Jackson, back on form as a chorus, moves through a series of extravagant suits that threaten to exhaust the spectrum.
The film is guilty of wearing its heart prominently on its sleeve. A funeral oration, by a white pastor (John Cusack) who has lived nearby all his life, plays a little like a spiritually inspired op-ed piece. “Mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow,” he explains after excoriating the National Rifle Association.
You could see Chi-Raq as the extravagant flipside of the considerably more sober I, Daniel Blake. Whereas Ken Loach makes his points through the ordered discipline of social realism, Lee embraces vibrant creative experiment. Indeed, if we were to pursue comparisons with British film-makers called Ken, we might be forced to bring Ken Russell into the conversation.
Like the wilder films of that great eccentric, Chi-Raq would profit from a little more structure. It is, nonetheless, a gorgeous, gorgeous thing that proves anger sometimes has the best tunes.
