Directrospective: POETIC JUSTICE (1993)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

Justice (Janet Jackson) and Lucky (Tupac Shakur) are too good-looking and magnetic to hate each other forever.

For a movie I was barely aware of, I sure was aware of this movie.

First of all, it’s the project Tupac Shakur is on The Arsenio Hall Show to promote in the infamous 1993 clip in which he goes totally off the rails talking about “poonani” immediately and throughout, the one so thoroughly strange that Paul Scheer and Jordan Peele recreated it word-for-word as a comedy sketch in 2013. And during my senior year of college, L.A. hip-hop station Power 106 barely played anything besides Kendrick Lamar’s Janet Jackson-sampling song named after the movie, so as I drove around in my Honda I’d sometimes flip over to the “Poetic Justice” station for a while.

It so happens that POETIC JUSTICE, the Tupac poonani movie, is a John Singleton film, and the follow-up to his landmark debut, BOYZ N THE HOOD. (It also happens that it doesn’t have a ton to do with karmic righteousness or that which goes around coming around; it’s mostly called that because it’s about a poet whose name is Justice.) Having become, at 24, the youngest ever and first Black nominee for the Best Director Academy Award (also a nominee for Best Original Screenplay), Singleton had a lot of people itching to work with him. It’s a testament to that film’s immediate reputation and impact that Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur signed on to star in, and that poet Maya Angelou not only granted the use of her poems but also agreed to appear in a small role in, the second feature of a man who was not yet old enough to rent a car.

POETIC JUSTICE is undeniably from the same writer-director as BOYZ N THE HOOD, while at the same time exploring very different ideas. Like BOYZ, POETIC JUSTICE begins in South Central, and it follows young Black people whose lives have been and will be altered by gang violence. It also stars major figures from the hip-hop and R&B world (Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur play the lead roles, with smaller appearances from Q-Tip, Queen Latifah, Busta Rhymes, Keith Washington, Suge Knight, and others). But these young people are at a very different point in their lives than Tre and Doughboy and Ricky were - hairstylist and poet Justice (Jackson in her first film role) and postal clerk Lucky (Shakur, fresh off of JUICE) are both in their early twenties, living on their own, and making decent money working good jobs. They’re more concerned with figuring out who they want to be and what kind of life they’d like to have than with the threat of drive-by shootings. The biggest difference between this film and its predecessor is that nearly all of it takes place pretty far from the hood.

Justice is a young woman who has mostly kept to herself and her poetry since the shooting death of her boyfriend (Q-Tip). She works at a hair salon and ignores the let’s-go-out proddings from her friend Iesha (Regina King, in a role much larger than her few lines in BOYZ). Finally, Iesha convinces her to come along on a trip to Oakland that her boyfriend Chicago (Joe Torry) has to make in his mail truck with a coworker from the post office. Justice was going to Oakland that weekend for a hair show anyway, so really she’s just hitching a ride. Then she learns that Chicago’s coworker is Lucky, the postal carrier whose advances she had strongly rebuffed in the insane “You wanna smell my poonani?” scene that inspired Shakur’s Arsenio behavior.

The bulk of the movie plays out on a very unrushed road trip up the California coast, interspersed with Jackson reading poetry (hers in the film, Angelou’s in reality) in voiceover. Iesha and Chicago roll around all over each other on piles of mail in the back of the truck, leaving Justice and Lucky to argue and sulk in the cab. Singleton wisely has them take the less-direct route to Oakland, which is wildly more picturesque than the endless flat brown along the I-5 and gives the good-looking bickerers more time in which to fall for each other. In a lovely sequence, Lucky decides to pull off the road following the scent of barbecue, where they all stumble on a huge Black family reunion. He proposes they all pretend they’re part of the family in order to snag some free food. They’re welcomed immediately, and while it seems like some in the family have their suspicions about what’s really going on, there is a feeling of camaraderie and joy at being together with other Black people out here on the side of the highway that transcends trivial genealogical concerns. Angelou herself appears here as one of a group of older women dispensing advice on life and love, and the warm generosity she always exudes makes the digression more than worth it. Things at the reunion are great until Iesha flirts with other men and Chicago gets mad and the four Angelenos have to make a quick escape.

Watching this film and BOYZ, it’s been a surprise to see Regina King giving largely comedic performances as brash women who tend to speak before they think. Her recent roles on prestige television shows like The Leftovers and Watchmen and films like Barry Jenkins’s IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, have all made use of the immense decency she projects onscreen. King plays vulnerable-but-resilient better than just about anybody. By contrast, these early Singleton films have her giving other characters an unfiltered piece of her mind, often while comically drunk. She’s very funny, and I’d love to see her in a big studio comedy if that’s something she’s interested in.

As overtly political as BOYZ is, this film is political more by the fact of its being than by any explicit story events. The issues on which BOYZ focused aren’t gone completely here - when Justice and Lucky reach Oakland, they learn that Lucky’s cousin has been shot to death, just as Justice’s boyfriend is at the beginning of the film, and a subplot involves Lucky taking his daughter away from her crack-addicted mother - but JUSTICE is more a film about a moment in the lives of two Black people than it is about Life In Black America More Broadly. Since the release of BOYZ, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising had left its mark on South L.A., and Singleton doesn’t hide the burnt husk of a building when the mail truck drives past on the way out of town. It’s an undeniable part of these character’s lives, but it’s not the only thing that will ever happen to them. By taking young Black people out of the urban environment in which they are almost exclusively depicted onscreen, Singleton gives Jackson and Shakur the chance to be the extremely magnetic romantic leads that they are. Set against rolling yellow hills and rocky shorelines, we get a chance to see Justice and Lucky as individuals with opinions and fears and desires that are separate from their racial and socio-economic positions. It’s a pretty good movie.