Before there was coastal beef, when Biggie was just getting started, before Tupac got got and just after Kurt Cobain popped a hole in his head is where the coming-of-age film, The Wackness takes place.
The Wackness paints a mural of New York City in 1994, the year when hip hop was golden and a heat wave hit the city. Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, who earned an Audience Award during the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, expectations of The Wackness are that it's a goofy comedy about partying. Instead, it takes us on a raw graffiti soaked morality tale through the streets of the Rotten Apple.
The film is set in the summer that the newly inaugurated Mayor Rudy Giuliani vowed to clean up the city. But in the meantime, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is getting by the best he can. It's his last summer before college and he's spending it selling weed around the city and even trading it to his shrink, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), to get free psychoanalysis. From here the film takes its course.
One of the most refreshing things about The Wackness is that it doesn't try to be bigger than it really is. One of the things that killed the indie film movement was every director's desire to make the biggest movie they could, usually with bloated casting. The Wackness, wisely, avoids this. It has no bankable stars (Kingsley and Janssen are as close as it gets) and the direction is no-nonsense, hand-held simplicity.
The only special effects are the graffiti-style title cards that introduce each month of the summer. Though they have next to nothing in common, I was reminded of Fresh, a fantastic streets-of-New-York drug dealer drama that was released in...1994. How about that! Levine's direction is hip, off-beat and meant to capture that time and place while demonstrating some attitude in the process.
Levine pulls it all off while not forgetting that amid the more personal and serious things in the story, there's some space for crazy bits of humour and visual panache. This might be the only movie you'll ever see where a Spike Lee-inspired fast-speed-first-person sprint around the city streets is led by a middle finger.
Even though the movie is set in '94, the tracks are all over the map. It's all good though because it's Golden Era. The selections range from the obvious Fresh Prince's Summertime, and Biz' Just a Friend to Wu Tang, Nas and Tribe. It's always nice to hear Craig Mack and Illmatic era Nas again and the sound of Total's Cant Ya See.
The Wackness has some new faces and some old faces, and what they have in common is that all of the actors are really good, really good at telling a simple but heartfelt story about how life can drag you down if you let it. However, there is always room for hope, and sometimes, we just make it so hard on ourselves that we might just choose the wrong option.
By Will Freeman (Contributor) http://www.planeturban.com
