Michael Rapaport’s riveting hip-hop documentary Beats Rhymes & Life gets uncomfortably close to A Tribe Called Quest, one of the most important and influential groups of the past 25 years. It’s two things at once: a loving, magnetic, gloriously alive tribute to a golden age when a group of brilliant young black men and women joined forces to reinvent hip-hop in their own funky, Afrocentric image, and the most penetrating psychological study of a creative partnership in perpetual peril since Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. Why do the sunniest groups often have the darkest, most fucked-up internal dynamics? Listening to A Tribe Called Quest, the Ramones, or the Beach Boys, few would imagine that the principals in each group were locked in decades-long psychodramas.
