Hustle and flow: "Highest 2 Lowest"

At this point, the arrival of a new Spike Lee film can only ever be a big deal. The thing about his latest Highest 2 Lowest is that it's almost all deals, on camera as off. This is Lee the canny cinematic entrepreneur hitching his wagons to those of Apple and A24, ensuring himself final cut even as he locks his film into a stuttering release pattern: premium cinemas first weekend, everywhere else the same day it hits streaming. (When you take a streamer's money, you get to call the shots - but they get to decide how and where those shots are ultimately seen.) Yet it's also Lee the American culture vulture taking back ownership of the Ed McBain novel (King's Ransom) that previously served as the basis for Akira Kurosawa's 1963 film High and Low; and it's Lee the devoted New Yorker conspiring with DoP Matthew Libatique to ensure his home city has rarely looked more polished and sheeny, a shimmering shrine to capital. (An opening squadron of helicopter and drone shots - set aflight to "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" - target the city's skyscrapers and penthouses, and establish this NYC as a playground for the megarich.) The plot, as in Lee's comparable Inside Man from 2006, is itself a matter of negotiation. One of those opening swoops carries us inside the lavishly appointed bolthole of music mogul David King (Denzel Washington), an analogue for your Dr. Dres and Damon Dashes, reputedly blessed with "the best ears in the business", and found trying to stave off a corporate buyout and regain control of his empire. This boardroom drama will be overtaken by other matters that in turn require a substantial injection of cold hard cash, namely - as per McBain, as per Kurosawa - a kidnap plot involving his nearest and dearest.

So it's capitalism, lineage and legacy, law and order: Lee could hardly have picked more apposite material for his first film of the second Trump administration, even before one of King's associates raises the thorny issue of cancel culture. (The Kamala poster in the bedroom of King's teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) now hangs as a poignant relic of a road not taken.) As more than one first responder has pointed out, this material - which does, after all, hail from the late 1950s - comes with a measure of inbuilt conservatism: we're meant not just to follow the money here but actively swoon over what it can buy you, while hoping that the film's rich protagonist can find a way to maintain the gilded status quo. Yes, David King has - in this iteration - become a Black creative, but he's still a Black creative who tells his son to watch his mouth, insists he's the only man in this household, and elects to pay the ransom less out of conscience than an awareness of image management. Lee has asked Washington to lean into his default patrician bearing: the actor duly makes King a cagey operator who barely seems more approachable after he takes off his industry wardrobe of shades and diamond earstud. (Even at his most relaxed, he's a family guy.) Here, Highest 2 Lowest does appear to come down firmly on the side of the lofty, which is unexpected from the filmmaker who gave the world Do the Right Thing and When the Levees Broke, but perhaps less so from a now 68-year-old filmmaker (himself a family man) who enjoys courtside seats at the games of his beloved Knicks.

Rubbing against that interpretation, though, is the conviviality with which Lee goes about his business here; for the most part, Highest 2 Lowest is informed by much the same playfulness of spirit as governed 2018's BlacKkKlansman, an irrepressible joy at bringing different kinds of people together (old friends, fresh faces, actual musicians who bring in new notes) in order to make a movie. As flagged by the number of lines in Alan Fox's script that double as song lyrics, this is an unusually polyphonic multiplex thriller, idiosyncratic-to-eccentric in its rhythms (distinctive in a way that confirms Lee's having final cut) and ever alert to those moments where negotiations break down into outright squabbling or taunting. It's very savvy in knowing what kinds of scenes make for an entertaining movie: a midfilm setpiece ("it's showtime", as one character announces it) combines a subway ransom drop with a tour of the city and its various tribes, while also tying together this filmmaker's love of music and sports. (The film may well get booed in Boston.) But Lee also knows how to make such scenes come alive: his pacing, cutting and framing remain several notches more dynamic than almost everything else on release. If the conservatism of the material seeps into the filmmaking, it's only in the sense of the classical, Lee's understanding of what's essential to the action. There is, at any rate, enough juice in these images to make one wonder anew why this director's Old Boy remake was such a sorry husk: doubtless the studio imposed rather more limitations, and ended up getting in his way.

Here, though, Lee has taken the money and invested it in people, reasoning it takes two to negotiate, three to make a crowd, and that no man shall pass from the top of Manhattan to the bottom (or go from high to low) without encountering traffic or resistance of some other form: it's why this ransom drop intersects with a vibrant block party. If David King remains on the defensive, trying to keep what's his, Lee is operating with far greater generosity, throwing a concert in the middle of the movie he's making. Throughout, Highest 2 Lowest strives to offer those of us in the cheap seats a little more for our bucks: a three-person detective team, actors you're glad to see getting the work, songs that sound fantastic whether in Dolby or on Apple Music, a scene in which Denzel schools A$AP Rocky in how to rap (testament to Lee's mischievous, crowdpleasing instincts), a music video or two, those cutaways to cultural artefacts that have become a feature of Lee's recent work (director as curator; movie as museum, at a time when actual American museums are coming under threat) and a concluding piano recital. One reason we shouldn't be too huffy about the release strategy is that, in the context of today's movie marketplace, Highest 2 Lowest is a premium experience; it's also a lot of fun besides, finding room within the narrow alleyways of McBain's plotting for the diversity of expression that makes movies, cities and countries alike great. That accounts for the film's odd, unruly shape - its own resistance to the straight lines Kurosawa drew, and others would impose on society - but it's unmistakably one made by an American film artist, oddly rallying, and likely the most patriotic entertainment you'll see coming across the pond all year.

Highest 2 Lowest is now showing in selected cinemas, and streaming via Apple TV+.