In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.
Once upon a time in South Central Los Angeles, a goofy, grief-stricken fairy-tale romance imagined Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur as grounded yet swoon-worthy young people making their way through lives often sensationalized as more Grimm than Disney. Poetic Justice, writer-director John Singleton’s 1993 follow-up to Boyz N The Hood and the then-25-year-old’s second film, uses the rare perspective of a young Black woman to balance the complex realism of Singleton’s hometown with the shiny fantasy of a love story.
The latter, in all its fakey Hollywood glory, is undermined for laughs in the striking first scene of Poetic Justice, where bright-white Billy Zane and Lori Petty star in the silly film-within-a-film lighting up a drive-in full of Black teens trying to hook up. And, just as that melodrama on the big screen goes wrong in ludicrous fashion, the small-scale drama in the parking lot ends in all-too-real tragedy. Though the characters of Poetic Justice go on a road trip that wouldn’t be out of place in any lighthearted romantic romp, and run into incidents as ridiculous as any in broad ensemble comedies, each compartmentalizes trauma underneath the more multiplex-friendly broad strokes of the plot. There’s enough enemies-to-lovers in the more generic arc of the story to win over the romance diehards, but the wounded people on this trajectory bear the scars inherent to their upbringing.
Specific images of loss, of flashing emergency vehicle lights and concerned crowds and wailing mothers, are juxtaposed with literal poetry. Justice (Jackson) reads her broad-themed stanzas (written for Poetic Justice by Maya Angelou, who turns up later as a hilarious cookout guest) as evocative narration to the film’s everyday woes. Alternatively lamenting and empowering, these emotional readings counter Justice’s numbed experiences working at a beauty salon, rebuffing flirty losers, and lying on the floor with her cat. She’s deeply isolated and her mourning gives way to depression, the only light piercing its clouds taking the form of these aspirationally vulnerable words.
Though specifically written for Jackson, Poetic Justice was also supposed to be the start of a flourishing filmmaking relationship between Singleton and Shakur, one that was going to continue in the final film of Singleton’s Hood Trilogy and extend beyond it. “He was going to be my Robert De Niro,” Singleton told Essence. “We were going to grow together. When you see Baby Boy [which stars Tyrese Gibson] now, his presence and soul are still in that movie.” While mailman Lucky (Shakur) finds himself stuck in a rom-com setup—driving up the coast to Oakland on a double-date work trip with his vain coworker Chicago (Joe Torry), Chicago’s partygirl honey Iesha (Regina King), and Iesha’s friend Justice—he’s also preoccupied with his own problems. He’s got a young daughter, who he has just taken custody of after her mother fell back into a crack habit. His relationship with his own mother is strained, leaving him just as lonesome as Justice, and he’s also got music-industry aspirations, which he hopes will be a light freeing him from his life’s tunnel.
The individual ennui of Justice and Lucky helps fuel their connection and drive their yearning. It’s Jackson’s first film and Shakur’s second, and the vulnerable, thorny chemistry between them—not to mention the tragicomedy of King and Torry, or the small scene-stealing performances from rappers Q-Tip and Tone Loc—demonstrates Singleton’s precise abilities with less-experienced actors. Not only could he spot talent (Boyz N The Hood kicked off the careers of King, Nia Long, Cuba Gooding Jr., Angela Bassett, Ice Cube, and Morris Chestnut), he could give his cast material so honest and authentic that natural charisma was all that was needed to power it. It’s laughably, transparently racist that Jackson was given a Razzie for her performance, because she’s an instant charmer whose mix of sadness and hope is perfect for a young woman realizing she’s been blindsided by infatuation.
But Singleton’s specificity isn’t limited to the spark between his leads. Partially shot in the immediate aftermath of the Rodney King verdict (Singleton was late to set early in the shoot after protesting at the courthouse), Poetic Justice simmers with the rage and pain of L.A. As the group departs for Oakland, they pass Black-owned businesses identified with spray paint to hopefully deter rioters, and burned-out shells of buildings which already fell to their wrath. The racist assumption that “Black” equaled “violent” haunted Poetic Justice when it opened a year later. One theater initially refused to screen the film out of fear of violence, while trades like Variety stoked the flames. But a film simply attuned to the real lives of South Central L.A. is no glamorizing war film or leering horror—especially one from a filmmaker as nuanced as Singleton.
Despite its gunshots and fistfights, the most potent violence in Poetic Justice is that which keeps its characters siloed and distant, unfulfilled and without a support network. In an early scene—filled with complaining, shit-shooting, and racial ball-busting between Chicago, Lucky, and their coworker E.J. (Jackson’s secret then-husband René Elizondo Jr.)—Singleton captures the specific animosity that grows from secure yet dead-end employment, evoking another classic of the L.A. U.S.P.S., Charles Bukowski’s Post Office. A similar sniping friction permeates Justice’s salon, where its proprietor lectures her employees while one stylist (Spike Lee staple Roger Guenveur Smith) silently seems to grapple with an AIDS diagnosis.
The tedium of this professional soullessness and the messy desperation of the leads’ personal lives gets its own rebuttal on the road when the foursome crashes a cookout. The tantalizing family reunion, filled with barbeque and beer and games of spades and matching t-shirts, picturesque colors all but glowing in the sunlight, represents a life brighter than either Lucky or Justice have imagined. Telling white lies and helping themselves to a plate are the closest they can get to this Edenic image of Black family life.
Yet, even faking their way through an event like this kindles a bit of hope between the two. Seeing this vision of possibility, and later wandering through a vivid African cultural fair, awakens Lucky and Justice to the potential of each other. Optimism awakens on the road, even amid their gender-war bickering and the escalating confrontations between their tripmates. It’s a fantasy, as any burgeoning romance is a fantasy, one where daydreams of a better future start spinning out at the pace of your pulse. The rosy promise of this fairy tale is that, even when real life crashes headlong into these plans, the ideas themselves can never be killed.
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