Provocative Chi-Raq takes on inner-city violence

Spike Lee has a knack for making movies that can blow away viewers. His latest film, Chi-Raq, is no exception—a whirlwind of blaxploitation cinema and ancient Greek drama swirling around a semi-musical core about gang violence. The dizzying burlesque will disorient some viewers, but those who ride it out will find a steely rebuke.

Chi-Raq (rated R for strong sexual content including dialogue, nudity, language, some violence, and drug use) is a modern-day adaptation of Aristophanes’ ribald comedy Lysistrata, a tale about a woman’s mission to end the war between Athens and Sparta. Dolemedes (Samuel L. Jackson) narrates the film, functioning as the chorus would in a Greek drama. All the film’s characters deliver their dialogue in pairs of rhyming lines. Community matriarch Miss Helen (Angela Bassett) recalls the days before guns flooded her neighborhood:

“There was a time when it was hot.

Children could go outside and not get shot.”

That time is a distant memory.

A stray bullet fired during a shootout between two rival Chi-Raq (a bellicose byword for the Windy City) gangs kills Irene’s (Jennifer Hudson) young daughter, Patti. (In 2008, Hudson’s real-life brother-in-law murdered her mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew in Chicago.) The community’s women have had enough of the violence. They devise a plan to withhold all sexual favors from their husbands and lovers until Demetrius’ (Nick Cannon) Spartans gang and Cyclops’ (Wesley Snipes) Trojans sign a peace treaty. Their effort draws in more of the city’s women and spreads to the mayor’s household and beyond.

The libido blackout stretches on for months and spurs many of the film’s hilarious scenes, as frustrated men go to desperate lengths to win back their ladies. When dozens of women take over the city’s armory and lock themselves into chastity belts, the men set up giant amplifiers outside the armory and blast The Chi-Lites’ romantic ballad “Oh Girl” in a nearly successful effort to soften up their pertinacious partners.

Viewers able to look past the bawdiness—no easy feat—might detect an unsettling political skewering akin to Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine. Moore ridiculed white gun rights advocates, but Lee—who produced, directed, and co-wrote Chi-Raq—squarely confronts “black-on-black” crime. The film notes that since 2001, over 7,000 Chicagoans have been murdered, more than the number of American service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined during that period.

Without dismissing the effects of police brutality, persistent poverty, and low education on a community’s morale, Lee still doesn’t allow Chicago to play the victim card. He craftily uses a farcical sex strike and clownish song-and-dance numbers as a fun house mirror in which both violent gangbangers and indifferent politicians might see their absurd behavior. If reason won’t produce repentance, Lee hopes scorn will.

Ultimately, neither will. The light does break through at Patti’s funeral service, but at its conclusion a long-winded speech from Father Mike (a miscast John Cusack) rolls the clouds back in. Lee doesn’t hold back here either: In a big church, dancers, band, and choir participate in a big worship production while a soloist sings out, “Jesus, He is our King, worthy of honor and praise.”

For a moment, Lee gets it right.