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Sam Donager (Brooke Shields) is a documentary filmmaker. With her husband, Terry (Robert Downey Jr.), she tracks down a group of white, upper class kids who are drawn to hip hop culture and follows them in an attempt to understand them. They lead her to a group of friends surrounding a new recording artist, Cigar (Raekwon). Through them we meet a basketball player (Allan Houston), who is dating a student (Claudia Schiffer) writing her thesis on race. The basketball player is offered a bribe to fix games by another man (Ben Stiller), who may have something personal against him. One of the white kids (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is the brother of another kid (William Lee Scott), who is more ensconced in the world his brother occasionally visits. He is asked to take care of a situation by Rich (Power), which means silencing a potential problem with a gun. This is complicated, because the boys are actually the estranged sons of the District Attorney (Joe Pantoliano). Also, a club is being opened in Rich's neighborhood by some white kids (Scott Caan, etc.), who did not have the courtesy to come to Rich about it first. Did you get all of that? There is more, but I'll let you see the movie to decipher it.

While the non-actors are a little uneven, the documentary idea sort of smoothes that over with a fly on the wall perspective. Among the most fascinating things were a few, fairly telling scenes with Mike Tyson, as himself, being very interesting and accessible. William Lee Scott is good as a kid fighting to lose the identity he was born with and gain the respect of new peers. Allan Houston could be in another movie, as he does fairly well with what he is given. My eye is always drawn to Robert Downey Jr., and he has good energy as a gay man swept up in a working relationship with a woman, his wife, although the addition of this story further convoluted the whole affair, which I thought was about race. Ben Stiller can do anything, including drama, and his (possibly) non-scripted stuff is really wonderful. There are a lot of big name actors with very little screen time. For example, don't see this movie just for Jared Leto or Elijah Wood, because they are barely in it.

This movie is worth watching as people watching. We never have enough time with any one character to really get them, but, as they breeze by us, we do get an idea of different lives and different ideas.

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originally posted: 01/22/03 07:19:16
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