An urban b-ball legend steers the new kids away from victimology and rage.
Charles Stone III’s Uncle Drew confirms the urban legend that the best stand-up comedy, face-to-face drama, and spontaneously creative choreography can be found on city basketball courts.
Stone’s film is centered on Harlem’s Rucker Park, the real-life site of amateur, yet stellar, b-ball competition; it’s where many professional players and college draftees were first discovered. (Beastie Boy Adam Yauch memorialized Rucker Park in his exhilarating 2008 sports documentary Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot.) B-ball enthusiast Dax Winslow (Lil Rel Howery) loses face at Rucker and has resorted to coaching ambitious newcomers who are looking for their own #1 spot. This contrast between talent and skill, experience and facileness, is Stone’s wheelhouse; his wonderful 2004 baseball film Mr. 3000 starred Bernie Mac in a classic illustration of a mature athlete competing against younger, flashier, even more arrogant players, although his real challenge was with himself.
Dax similarly frets about losing. In a nightmare, his team’s teddy-bear mascot cries, “That’s unbearable!” And that’s when I instantly knew I was loving this movie’s sweet-natured, double-barreled jokiness. Dax gets rescued from despair by blessed good fortune when he meets Uncle Drew (Kyrie Irving), an aged Rucker Park star. The Uncle Drew myth is introduced in a hilarious barbershop sequence where black guys entertain one another by trading urban fables about Drew that secretly boost their own ego. Septuagenarian Drew proves to be more than myth when he schools Dax on sports and music, i.e., folk history.
“How’d you get Biggie on 8-track?” Dax asks after Drew drops a cartridge playing The Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” into the console of his old-fashioned, make-out van. Youngblood Dax knows the melody only from its sample on The Notorious B.I.G.’s rap hit “Big Poppa.” The scene’s cultural-heritage game is tricky but telling. Those two R & B and hip-hop tracks were fairly contemporaneous, so Stone and screenwriter Jay Longino are making a point about different generational perceptions. Drew knew the art and ingenuity that influenced Biggie (The Notorious B.I.G.), and his sense of recall is crucial to how Stone and Longino relate the black cultural past to the black cultural present. More than a game, it’s slam-dunk political and cultural consciousness.
From the opening b-ball montage — scored to wah-wah guitar riffs that echo ’70s blaxploitation and disco — Uncle Drew confronts Millennial black culture with the traditions and ancestors that preceded it. Drew restores Dax’s confidence by assembling several of his ’60s teammates: Preacher (Chris Webber), Lights (Reggie Miller), Boots (Nate Robinson), Betty Lou (Lisa Leslie), and Big Fella (Shaquille O’Neal). These veterans personify the heritage Dax is estranged from, becoming his dream team in a tournament against bodacious Rucker rivals.
The old-school-revival plot emulates the pop references of Larry Cohen’s 1994 Original Gangstas, which reunited Seventies blaxploitation stars Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Fred Williamson, and Richard Roundtree. But Drew’s teammates are stars in disguise; they’re folk heroes who — having moved to the sidelines, away from sports or on to the decrepitude of forgotten seniors — find one more chance to prove what they know and what they can do.
Congressional Black Caucus members Maxine Waters and John Lewis, who of late seem to misremember the exemplary behavior of the civil-rights era, could learn something from Uncle Drew.
Each athlete-actor is genuinely charismatic and more than inspirational. There’s marvelous good humor in seeing Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving (who is only 26) hide his handsomeness within white-haired, wrinkle-face makeup; his stunt combines Richard Pryor’s Mudbone with Tyler Perry’s Madea. It’s cultural continuity and a life lesson that the other athletes-actors share. As female jock, Bettie Lou says to male jock Preacher, “Game recognizes game.” No classic Hollywood screwball comedy romance ever stated it better. (Off court, the Bettie Lou and Preacher wife-and-husband team are Evangelists who run Calm Before the Storm Divine Ministries.) These sports figures bring uncanny substance that Howery (the only amusing performer in Get Out) lacks and that Tiffany Haddish, who plays his ex, reduces to cartoonishness.
Congressional Black Caucus members Maxine Waters and John Lewis, who of late seem to misremember the exemplary behavior of the civil-rights era, could learn something from Uncle Drew. The light-hearted example Drew presents to Dax is a stark contrast to Waters’s and Lewis’s bouts of petulance. A non-pessimistic, non-sarcastic entertainment like this offers a truly radical political proposition when its characters puts faith in principle, rather than what street culture calls “the hustle.”
Hustling on the court can overtake political and moral principles. Black politicians and showbiz celebrities alike are habitually committed to “getting over.” They share the same concern as star athletes who amass wealth and social influence, hoping it will protect them from suffering everyday social inequities. But when Drew and his veterans recall 1968, they’re remembering more than a peak instance of fashion and rebellion They understand the need to prove themselves to themselves — while teaching Dax’s generation about perseverance. The moment Drew tells Dax “You don’t love the game, you’re a hustler!” is devastating because that realization goes against the gangsta mentality of unethical black social development. It cuts to the quick. Nonblack audiences can benefit from this lesson, too.
Stone’s previous films (Paid in Full, Drumline, Mr. 3000) are the only movies in American history to penetrate black male insecurity. If you don’t know those movies, you cannot appreciate how Hollywood films from Precious to 12 Years a Slave to Straight Outta Compton to Moonlight ignore the genuine, humane possibilities in black American life. Uncle Drew continues Stone’s sensitive, disarming, loving approach that avoids currently fashionable black victimology. The final Rucker Park game is predictable and not as rousing as the real games seen in Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot, yet by then, Stone and Longino’s cynicism-free approach climaxes with a dance-club scene where the codgers revive themselves. (Shaq walks and pop-and-locks majestically.) Their wriggly, celebratory hip-hop moves reveal the same cultural essence that Kanye West’s new song “Ghost Town” ingeniously expressed: “I feel kinda free / We’re still the kids we used to be.” Like Uncle Drew, like Kanye, Stone knows what culture is for.