Movie Review: 'Clockers'

In the decade since he spearheaded the renaissance of African-American filmmaking, Spike Lee, it’s startling to realize, has never made a movie that confronted the apocalyptic breakdown of life in the inner city — the drugs and gangs and fractured families, the escalating cycles of rage, murder, and despair. But now we have CLOCKERS (Universal, R), his electrifying adaptation of Richard Price’s inner-city novel, and once you’ve seen it you may find yourself forgetting every previous drama on the subject. Produced by Martin Scorsese, Clockers doesn’t look or feel like other ”Spike Lee joints.” Inspired, perhaps, by his new cinematographer, Malik Sayeed, Lee has jettisoned most of his trademark technical razzmatazz; it’s as if he were trying to burn straight through to the heart of his material. The images in Clockers are like something out of a nightmare newsreel, raw and grainy and pulsatingly alive. And the acting is free of the in-your-face raucousness that Lee, in the past, has so often confused with dramatic force. The story of a young black drug dealer who may or may not have committed a murder, Clockers is a work of staggering intelligence and emotional force — a mosaic of broken dreams.

Shifting the setting of Price’s 1992 novel from a fictional New Jersey town to a crumbling neighborhood in Brooklyn, the movie pivots around the deceptively passive figure of Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a sullen 19-year-old ”clocker” who hawks vials of crack cocaine from the benches in front of his housing project, soothing his stress-induced ulcer with sugary swigs of vanilla pop. Strike, like his fellow clockers, reports to Rodney (Delroy Lindo), a cagey middle-aged coke kingpin who runs a local junk shop as a front. Rodney has taken Strike under his wing, but he maintains his paternal grip by exacting Faustian favors. Early on, he asks Strike to do a job: He wants a young dealer who’s been stealing from him murdered. A few scenes later, the dealer is lying in a fast-food parking lot, dead of four gunshot wounds.

As police gather around the blood-spattered body, the scene seems to hit us on three levels at once. There are the ugly clinical details of death that most movies keep off screen: the stench of the body, the brains splattered on the ground. There’s the hideous jocularity of the cops themselves; to them, the victim is just one more dead ”yo.” And there’s a third, unspoken level of dramatic tension. Where Lee, in previous films, might have used this scene simply to score points off racist police, here he gets us to question their very ghoulishness. Could they all be this callous? (As it turns out, no.) The real theme of Clockers is the disguise worn by cops and criminals alike, the humanity that survival demands they keep under wraps.

Did Strike do the deed, as asked? Or was it his older brother, Victor (Isaiah Washington), who marches into the police station and confesses to the crime, claiming he was attacked in the parking lot? The chief investigator, Det. Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel), doesn’t buy Victor’s story; he thinks Strike is the killer. And Victor, a scrupulously upright young guy who’s been slaving away at two jobs (including a degrading shift at a fast-food joint), all so that he can move his family out of the projects, would seem to have no motivation to commit a murder this cold-blooded. That is, unless he was trying to save his brother.

Clockers, as you may have gathered, is that hokey old thing, a whodunit. Yet what matters in Price’s ingeniously twisty story line is less the ”who” than the ”why.” As the mystery snakes its way through the movie, other characters begin to emerge. There’s an AIDS-afflicted junkie (Tom Byrd) who haunts the neighborhood like a rotting phantom, and a young neighborhood boy (Pee Wee Love) who starts to hang around Strike and imitate his showiest hustler moves, with devastating results. (Their relationship is like a junior version of the one between Rodney and Strike.) The film’s most mesmerizing figure, though, is Delroy Lindo’s Rodney. This smooth operator woos everyone with his smiling, crusty benevolence, but when he finally unleashes his rage, sticking a gun in Strike’s mouth just as his best friend once did to him, we realize, with horror, that his word means nothing. Even the rage is just another mask. He’s a true sociopath, a machine of survival.

Enlarging his canvas with the smallest digressions, Lee gives Clockers the fluid, shifting panorama of a Robert Altman film. He peppers the movie with flashbacks, like Rodney’s bone-chilling vision of the first time he ever killed someone (a true heart-of-darkness moment), or a shocking scene with a young man who’s thrown into a crazed fury by Victor’s desire for respectability. What emerges is a kaleidoscopic vision of a community mired in betrayal, psychosis, and murder. (Everyone Victor meets seems to be urging him to become a criminal.) I do wish Lee hadn’t indulged his compulsion to play music under so many scenes (Terence Blanchard’s score is too moody by half), and that he’d been content with one ending instead of three. Still, these are minor flaws in a work of major passion.

Lee’s most challenging move turns out to be his most brilliant: He makes Strike neither an innocent nor a charismatic hooligan but a creature of pure, amoral instinct, a vessel for the do-or-die imperatives of the street. As Mekhi Phifer plays him (beautifully), Strike has an inscrutability that’s almost ghostly; this kid’s power lies in his refusal to reveal what he thinks. He’s a machine of survival too. Unlike Rodney, though, Strike hasn’t lost his soul; he just hasn’t found it yet. And the only one who even begins to see it is Rocco, the casually racist white cop, whose hard-nosed need for the truth turns him into a crusader in spite of himself. Near the end, when Strike, sitting in Rocco’s car, asks him why he’s gone through all of this for a bunch of black folks he couldn’t give a damn about, and Rocco offers a stoic nonresponse, it’s the most moving moment in any Spike Lee film: an unspoken acknowledgment of feelings that could be heard only in a better world. A