Poetic Justice

Subtitled “A Street Romance,” writer-director Singleton's sophomore effort touches the heart more when it's on the street than when it's making romance. In setting up the meet/fight/fall-in-love story of Justice, a young beautician and poet (Jackson), and Lucky, a postman and aspiring rapper (Shakur), Singleton returns to South Central L.A., the setting for his Boyz N The Hood, and provides us with intimate glimpses of the people who work and live there. He sketches in many characters -- beauticians, postal workers, a crack dealer, a panhandler -- and fills each with dimension and life, making real their rage, their despair, their struggle for hope, their caring. Maybe Singleton does the street too well, but when he kicks the love story into gear, putting Justice and Lucky on a road trip to Oakland with their friends Iesha (King) and Chicago (Torry), the film seems to lose its assurance and genuineness of feeling and become forced Hollywood movie-by-numbers. The further up the road and into the romance it goes, the more intrusive Stanley Clarke's score gets and the more generic Singleton's images become: they go from a sharply shot, very entertaining family reunion -- with a sly cameo by Angelou -- to a surprisingly subdued African fair to the coastal consummation between Justice and Lucky, which resembles nothing so much as an International Coffees ad. Fortunately, Singleton gets back to urban settings and recovers his sensitivity and surety, giving us a sweet but honest finale. Jackson does no powerhouse performing, but that's fine. Her muted woman in mourning is in her range and sympathetic; she does seem to have an emptiness in her, a hole in her heart. While the film never fully explores Justice's relationship to her poetry -- the work is Angelou's -- the device is effective: its eloquence about emotion and selfhood enhances Singleton's images. Shakur's Lucky is movingly complex; in his shrugs and sighs are the hundred wrestling feelings of a man with dreams fighting to hang on. In Lucky -- in most of Justice -- we get a rich, human story well told. Perhaps Singleton hasn't yet found his way around outside the Hood, but he reminds us how well he knows his way around inside it.