Mo' Better Blues
First screened in February 2016 / Most recently screened in August 2025
Director: Spike Lee. Cast: Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Spike Lee, Cynda Williams, Joie Lee, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, Jeff "Tain" Watts, Dick Anthony Williams, Abbey Lincoln, Robin Harris, John Turturro, Nicholas Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Leonard L. Thomas, Ruben Bladés, Linda Hawkins. Screenplay: Spike Lee. In Brief:
Palpably short of its ambitions. Keeps toggling among subplots and characters of which none take off. Sexist af.
VOR:③
Lee cultists and jazz aficionados may have more to say for it, but the misshapen story, uneven execution, and immature sensibility hold it back.
Mo' Better Blues falls palpably short of its strongly but chaotically implied goals. The script keeps toggling among subplots and characters of which none fully take off. The storytelling of this pronouncedly male-forward movie is also sexist as fuck, with both of the two main women poorly directed and conceived of almost entirely through their sexual partnerships with men and their mutual rivalry (to say nothing of the retrograde dénouement, the joy-killing mother at the beginning, and Giancarlo Esposito's cartoonish and repeatedly antagonized girlfriend).
The clear MVP, at least to me, is cinematographer and soon-to-be director Ernest Dickerson, who continues testing new lighting techniques, camera movements, and chromatic possibilities, even if his boss seems more creatively stalled. You can see already the visual tones and moods Dickerson will bring to Juice, his debut as top dog, barely two years later. Snipes shows a lot of potential here as well; if anything, he upstages Washington in several of their scenes, in an ironic mirroring of their character dynamics. I'm not surprised Lee cast him in the lead role of Jungle Fever directly afterward.
It often feels like Mo' Better Blues is begging to focus more tightly on this personal and professional frenemy relationship between Bleek and Shadow. I'd wager that either Washington demanded greater centrality for his character (or the producers did) or Lee was keen to craft a larger, multi-instrument ensemble piece in sync with the jazz milieu, thus declining to shrink it down to a duet, however dramatic. So we're left with a showcase vehicle for an unusually blurred-out star that's also a panoramic canvas with too little shape and much less collective charisma than the movie appears to presume.
Lee cultists and jazz aficionados may have more to say for Mo' Better Blues, and at least he has the alibi of attempting something slippery and difficult. I admire Lee for continuing to strike while early-career irons were hot (and for striking ever afterward, through thick times and thin). Regardless, the misshapen script, uneven execution, and immature authorial sensibility hold this movie back. The pacing is positively deadly, which is hardly what you want from a love letter to jazz. And each new conclusion, of which there are several, compounds the sense of disorganization and the cumulatively sour taste. Grade:C–
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you'd like.)
