The Hip Hop Project
Abandoned by his mother as a child and forced to eke out a living on the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Chris "Kazi" Rolle turned his life around through the "healing of hip - hop." Even more impressively, in 1999 the scrappy musician banded with the outreach program Art Start to help underprivileged New York youth write and produce a collaborative album of original material.
Despite the emotional KO of Rolle's underdog journey and the setback-strewn evolution of his students, director Matt Ruskin's feature-length debut fails to reach the same heights as its spunky subjects.
Executive-produced by Hip Hop Project supporter Bruce Willis (together with Def Jam's Russell Simmons, the actor donates studio time to the kids), Ruskin's film faithfully tracks the HHP participants over the course of their four-year-long endeavor. More in the vein of "Extreme Makeover: Personality Edition" than "Making the Band," Rolle insists his artists "focus on things of substance" and "channel criminal minds into creative minds" for three years before even touching their rhymes. Once they do, however, the results are a hodge podge of lyrics and performers, some electric, others dull, which Ruskin seems to feature rather indiscriminately.
In fact, it is the tyro director's slapdash structure and pacing that distract from the film's content. A rather haphazard architect of his own material, Ruskin tends to rush certain crucial developments while lingering on more lackluster details. He also tantalizes viewers with snippets of several students' lives -- Christopher "Cannon" Mapp, whose mom died of multiple sclerosis when he was 12, and Diana "Princess" Lemon, who raps about her convict father and her own abortion, in particular -- but cuts away just as the audience's emotional investments start to pay off. Some teens he glosses over so quickly they're hardly recognizable at all.
But despite his oft-confusing starts and stops, Ruskin clearly has an affinity and admiration for his subjects. When he follows Rolle back to visit his foster mother in his native Bahamas and consequently to confront his long-absent birth mother, he allows the musician room to sort through his emotions. The encounter is raw and truly moving.
And while the young director tends to skip over many of the larger societal issues plaguing many of the HHP participants, his desire to honestly platform the emotional heartbeat of his subjects still rings true.
Michelle Kung can be reached at michelle.kung@gmail.com.
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