Spike Lee's Chi-Raq is a satire as broad as Lake Michigan — a combo of bawdy comedy and righteous polemic that goes down with all the smoothness of a shot of grain alcohol. The script, which Lee wrote with Kevin Willmott (C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America), unfolds mostly in salty, often rhyming verse, breaking for the occasional musical number or anguished sermon. Sample line: "Lysistrata had them all take a solemn oath / Stop the murder madness or there would be no more poon."
This is a film that attempts to take on the ongoing, very contemporary crisis of gun violence in Chicago's South Side by way of a nearly 2,500-year-old Greek play about women who stop a war by refusing to sleep with their men until they make peace. If there were a prize for going big or going home, then Lee's wild-eyed new movie would win it. Instead, we have the Oscars, and while Chi-Raq is looking unlikely to be a big contender in that race (despite an unsinkably star-making turn from Teyonah Parris), it is — alongside Adam McKay's financial crisis lecture in the shape of a feature The Big Short — one of the few films this fall that dares to take on issues that are immediate and imperative.
Chi-Raq — a reference to the number of Chicago homicides surpassing the number of American soldiers dead in Iraq, as well as the nickname of one of the film's characters — calls out politicians by name, spits rage about Dylann Roof and American racism, connects poverty and joblessness to cycles of violence, and demands gun control. Opening in the heartsick aftermath of the latest (well, as this is being written) mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, that last point alone is enough for Chi-Raq's urgency and gutsiness to put the notion that this is traditionally the season of serious cinema to shame.
If only it were a more coherent movie, one with as much precision and insight as it is daring, and one that didn't only half-jokingly assign the power to, and with it, the responsibility for, stopping violence to black women.
Chi-Raq is Lee's best scripted work in years, but that's not a high bar to clear after the studio flops of Oldboy and Miracle at St. Anna and the ill-fated indie experiments of Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and Red Hook Summer. From the start, it shows off Lee's dynamic stylistic flair, blaring "THIS IS AN EMERGENCY" and then splashing the lyrics to cast member Nick Cannon's "Pray 4 My City" across the screen as an intro. (Quentin Tarantino is not the only filmmaker reclaiming the overture.)
But Chi-Raq has as many zigzags in tone as it does ones in energy, ricocheting up and down. It's not so much that it goes from farce to drama as that it goes from focused to garbled. For every pulsing scene like the opening one in which Lysistrata (Parris) and her friends dance at a packed concert (Matthew Libatique, the cinematographer, brings the same vibrance to the performance footage that he did to Straight Outta Compton), there's one like the sequence in which she seduces a general in the National Guard, slapstick set up so sloppily that it's barely coherent.
Lysistrata, sultry and steely, "a woman like no other," is the lover of rapper and gangster Chi-Raq (Cannon), leader of the Spartans, whose war with the Trojans (headed up by a giggly, glittery eye patch–wearing Wesley Snipes) has a high body count made higher by all of the collateral damage. (Samuel L. Jackson, as Dolmedes, introduces the players as he narrates this "tale of two cities" to the camera.) Among those caught in the crossfire is a little girl whose mother, played by Jennifer Hudson, refuses to let her murdered daughter become another statistic, another killing that goes unsolved due to fear of reprisal.
That death, along with a lecture from stern neighbor Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), spurs Lysistrata to recruit the women in her area to withhold sex until their menfolk agree to put down the weapons — to, as one guy puts it, "shut down the penis power grid." The vow she leads the ladies in is long and outrageous and involves forbidding access to "the nappy pouch," but when it becomes a protest chant, it gets boiled down to something more succinct: "No peace, no pussy."
Chi-Raq is packed with sound bite–worthy topical flurries beyond that irreverent tagline, more than ever have time to sink in. John Cusack alone, playing a stand-in for real-life activist and priest Michael Pfleger, presides over a fiery funeral service in which he offers up rapid-fire thoughts on how guns end up in the hands of gangs, the neighborhood's unemployment rate, suburban idolization of urban criminality, and the prizing of street cred over survival. But for all its genuine if sprawling political awareness, Chi-Raq comes down to a battle of the sexes as much as the Aristophanes play that inspired it.
And that's where it spins its wheels, stuck on concepts much mustier than the provocative observations that came before — on the old assurance that women are the gatekeepers of sex and maintain an iron grip on its transactional value, even if they're using it for the greater good. Sure, politicians are in the pocket of the NRA and the South Side went 25 years without a trauma center, Chi-Raq says, but the real issue is that women have been allowing men to get away with these things. Lysistrata is drawn as this proudly sensual being, one who brings at least as much lust and love to her relationship with Chi-Raq as she receives, but she and the other women of various shapes and ages in the film are still helplessly gazed at from the outside, their leverage resting entirely in the ability to forbid access to their bodies.
Lee, one of cinema's foremost and most vibrant chroniclers of black masculinity, has had a rough track record with women onscreen from the start, from when the liberated heroine of his debut She's Gotta Have It, Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), ended up getting raped in what the movie positioned as comeuppance for her not committing to one of her three suitors. It's the one scene that Lee has said he would take back if he could, for how lightly it treats rape, and Chi-Raq's rallying cry of "no peace, no pussy" could be seen as a retort to the line that jealous, possessive Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks) put to Nola when assaulting her back in 1986: "Whose pussy is this?" ("Yours," she answered.)
Lysistrata and her allies assert plenty of ownership over their own genitals, but the clout they wield is portrayed as pretty much the same. They refuse sex instead of just refusing monogamy, but it's still a power that exists only in relation to the toxic male ego Chi-Raq places at the root of so many of the problems it chronicles. They're just lucky enough to exist in a heightened universe in which their saying no isn't ever met with violent retaliation or even, for the most part, infidelity. Everyone joins in Lysistrata's campaign of sexual frustration, including working girls and strippers (and, as noted in a throwaway line, men on the down low) — which enables a very funny scene of Dave Chappelle as a strip club owner lamenting his bare stage — but Chi-Raq also treats sex work as an apparent hobby that can be easily opted out of.
Lysistrata and company blue-ball the machismo right out of the guys in town, a feat that makes itself felt all the way back to the White House in this strange version of empowerment in which women are able to change the world only by changing men, and are able to change men only by cowing them sexually. Chi-Raq's a female-led fantasy that's still ultimately all about men and their flaws, and it's not surprise that Chi-Raq, government name Demetrius, emerges as the antagonist and the movie's most complex figure.
In the midst of the film's cartoony action, Cannon offers glimpses of the hopelessness under his character's swagger, as well as a frightening nihilism — how do you negotiate with someone who's resigned himself to a lack of a future and a likely early death? ("Ain't you tired of this shit?" someone asks, wearily.) The details that emerge about his mother, who he witnessed having to turn tricks for rent, and about the man who introduced him into gangbanging as a kid, complicate him rather than just explain him, making him into more of a person and less of a symbol than Lysistrata, whose background as an orphan is presented as a tabula rasa. He is not, despite his name, a convincing embodiment of the macro and micro forces Chi-Raq suggests have shaped the violence with which it wrestles. But he is a compelling character, holding out against the sex strike because he denies he needs anything other than bravado and oblivion.
Yes, Chi-Raq is a satire, as Lee felt the need to explain himself in a video after the film's trailer set off a conflagration of online controversy from people who saw its treatment of a serious problem as the stuff of comedy. It's not the first time Lee has spelled out the term — Bamboozled begins with Damon Wayans's character offering a definition — but the fact that the filmmaker has had to fling it up more than once as a preemptive defense is indicative of his sloppiness when it comes to the genre, in which he's been better at lobbing fireballs than aiming them.
Maybe that's why, in making the press rounds for the film, Lee has suggested with apparent seriousness that sex strikes could actually be effective in things like stopping campus rape. As Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in The Atlantic, this assumes that rapists care about consent, and also brushes over what Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, who's name-checked as an inspiration in Chi-Raq, admitted about sex strikes her women's peace moment embarked on. "It had little or no practical effect," Gbowee said. "But it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention." So maybe Lee knows exactly what he's doing in using this saucy-sounding media hook to bring attention to a pressing, undercovered situation. But maybe he should leave real women out of it.