Slam (1998)
First screened and reviewed in December 2024
Director: Marc Levin. Cast: Saul Williams, Sonja Sohn, Lawrence Wilson, Bonz Malone, Momolu Stewart, Ron Jones, Reamer Shedrick, Beau Sia, Allen E. Lucas, Richard Stratton. Screenplay: Sonja Sohn, Marc Levin, Bonz Malone, Saul Williams, and Richard Stratton (based on a story by Marc Levin and Richard Stratton). VOR:④
Key text of a 1990s independent U.S. cinema as aesthetically vital as it is politically engaged. Feels attuned to the cultures it depicts.
My date with this Sundance winner is 26 years overdue, and also right on time, in a way that bold, inspiring art always is. Not to mention art that isn't exactly what you thought it was; all this time, I'd been expecting a love Jones with rougher edges, which turns out to be, at best, on the outskirts of a ballpark in a neighboring time zone.
Slam is about equal parts poetry throwdown and prison pipeline, in some unavoidable ways familiar but in many others unfamiliar from adjacent movie treatments of both milieus. From the credits onward, the cutting achieves a constant, vital momentum throughout, even when the plot's whole, well-conveyed predicament is about stasis. There's even a slam-poetry aspect to the movie's editing, sometimes raging and sometimes tender, sometimes rhymed and sometimes jagged, without over-stressing an analogy to the film's (partial) subject. "Slam montage," if that's what we're going to call this propulsive rhythm and grammar, turns out to be as elastic and scene-specific as the different performers at an open mic: same art, same space, different praxes, different reasons for showing up and doing the thing. Slam sometimes slows when you think it's about to accelerate, sometimes does the opposite, sometimes hits the pace you're expecting but along an unexpected route, just as you were nearing a well-worn path. One thing I am telling you is that if you start watching Slam, expect to finish it in one sitting and to be drawn quickly into your most undivided attention.
Another thing I am telling you is that actual poetry writing and performance are not literal constants throughout Slam, even if they are inspirational, thematic, and aesthetic constants. Poems couldn't be further from your mind, for example, when the protagonist finds himself among the choppiest waters of the prison yard, caught between at least two feuding factions, and both confused and repelled by what either might want from him. Just when virtuosic language and access to self-expression seem furthest away is when they come roaring to the forefront of the film, in three totally surprising and dissimilar forms.
The poetry scenes in Slam are like the boxing scenes in Creed or Raging Bull, no two alike and every one indelible—though Raymond, our lead, is no Jake and no Adonis. The poetry scenes are also this film's musical numbers, communicating in a sudden, blazingly but carefully choregoraphed torrent what dialogue, image, and incident can't by themselves. Their focus and source is most often Raymond, but sometimes, even increasingly, they showcase characters we only really meet once. Some of them spotlight a character who has the charisma of a co-star but the screen time of a supporting player. Part of Slam's narrative and emotional tension springs from the question of which way it's going to go for this woman, embodied by The Wire's Sonja Sohn with dexterity, intelligence, fury, and fully persuasive knowledge of the voice and the role. I know nothing about Sohn's life, but she sure seems to be acting from hot-to-the-touch experience without seeming at all to be "playing herself."
All those qualities map equally onto Saul Williams's inhabitation of Raymond, as precise as Gwendolyn Brooks in all aspects of this detailed characterization, as electric and expansive as free verse. Slam's virtues are so broadly distributed across its story, its cast, and its cinematic expression that the movie could probably work well with any number of lead performers, but man, are we lucky we got the one we got. Slam's been creeping up my list lately for a few reasons. I was entranced as well as baffled by Saul Williams's most recent cinematic perplex, the gender-queer, Afro-futurist, American-Rwandan musical indie Neptune Frost. Meanwhile, I teach a film and literature course pretty regularly and have been meaning to check Slam out for possible inclusion. The film was recently restored and (I think?) rereleased, which was good for a minor PR bump if not much box office. It's the only DVD I've never watched on the shelf opposite the bathroom in my apartment, so I see it every day and am reminded of unfinished business. Having now seen Slam, there were other reasons I might have gotten to it faster. It's an interesting double-bill with Sing Sing, not just in setting or story but in mode of production, collaborative spirit, and distributed credit. (Williams and Sohn both get named as co-writers even though the original script, as understand it, preceded their involvement.) It's immersed in the Washington, DC, of the 1990s, the closest city to where I grew up and an area I'd just left when Slam gets going.
These are all good incentives to see Slam, touted at the time as one of its decade's seminal U.S. indies. Its reputation seemed to go quiet after a while, though I bet in the enclaves where it's long been loved, it is loooved, and probably also hotly debated. Adore it, argue about it, sit with it, sink into it, feel the impulse to pick up your own pen, follow the impulse to speak or face your own hard truths, whatever, do your thing, just see it. Grade:A–
Awards:
Cannes Film Festival: Caméra d'or (Best First Feature)
Sundance Film Festival: Grand Jury Prize (Dramatic)
