Chi-Raq

The title of the latest Spike Lee joint is "Chi-Raq" -- a phrase coined by Chicago-area hip-hop artists, in reference to the fact that the rate of gun deaths in Chicago dwarfs those recorded in many contemporary war zones.

But it may well be that Chi-raq is now an actual place, bearing that name -- at least within the cinema of Spike Lee. The director redresses Chicago's South side from the pavement up, filling the corners of each frames with purple and orange, the primary colors of this film's two gangs, the Trojans and the Spartans. Ads for fictional politicians and malt liquors fill the background. And the denizens of these Chi-raq streets dance and sway in a unison that's usually reserved for MGM musicals. The concerns of this movie may be real, but we're still in another universe.

Chi-raq is also the name of one of the film's main characters, a rapper (Nick Cannon) who's fiercely loyal to his gang of Spartans. But if someone here deserves the designation of "title character," it isn't him. Instead that'd be his girlfriend, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris.) You may recognize the name. "Lysistrata" is a Greek satire circa 400 BCE, penned by Aristophanes. It concerns the eponymous woman, who gathers together the females of all Greek states, and gets them to commit to a sex strike -- one that will stretch on until their husbands sign a peace treaty to end the Peloponnesian war. Lee, as you can likely tell, has updated that exact story within his pseudo-Chicago setting. His own Lysistrata strikes the same truce among the women on either side of the Spartan-Trojan war. Together, they promise to reject any man "who comes to their direction in erection."

The original Aristophanes text does not feature many of the proto-Brechtian devices that we associate with Greek plays. But Lee, being a lifelong conceptualist, inserts them anyways. And so we have Samuel L. Jackson as a one-man Greek chorus to carry us through the narrative, often interrupting the plot, and breaking through the fourth wall, to share his thoughts. Taking his lead (and the lead of many other Spike Lee movies), a number of the characters in this film are framed so that they're addressing the audience directly, as on the stage. And there's one flourish that does come from the text proper: Lee's characters speak in rhyming verse, often in the same rhythms they use when performing rap music. So Jackson's chorus is more like an MC.

Gang violence is the starting point; that's where Lee sets his center stage. But then the movie sprawls out until it could fill out a Big Top tent. Lysistrata and her gang of chaste women take over their local National Guard Armory, which allows Lee to call on figures that represent all sorts of social issues: SWAT teams that look like SEAL Team 2, mayors and public servants who are most worried about the state of their own bedrooms; military officers who hang Confederate flags over state buildings. This is the trait that earns Spike Lee the adjective most often used against him -- "messy" -- but that's by design. He recognizes the inextricability of gun politics from race politics, or of crime politics from gender politics, and so on and so forth. He lets all of them pile onto each other, like clowns into a car.

Everyone converged at the Armory is a walking social issue, and our host Mr. Jackson spends the last third of the film weaving through them, as though this were a street parade. "Chi-raq" is not a straight-through satire -- a priest played by John Cusack offers extended monologues diagnosing the structural causes of racial inequality, with nary a joke or rhyme heard within them -- but the film has a sense of aesthetic bombast that never wavers, all the same. This is like a carnival, but with a conscience.