Highest 2 Lowest Is All the Best and Worst of Spike Lee

Highest 2 Lowest is an old man’s movie, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. Spike Lee is 68 years old, and Denzel Washington is 70, and it’s fitting for them to ruminate on what they’ve accomplished and how they fit into a world that continues to change around them. Lee and Washington have been working together for half their lives, beginning with Mo’ Better Blues in 1990. Highest 2 Lowest, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and will head to theaters in August, marks their fifth collaboration. All that shared history on screen gives their new film a metatextual poignancy — it doesn’t just reunite the director and his greatest leading man, but is also centered on a character who refracts different aspects of them as artists. David King, played by Washington, is a music mogul — the hitmaker behind 50 Grammys and a man known for having “the best ears in the business.” Neither he nor his label, Stackin’ Hits, are as dominant as they used to be, and he’s on the verge of selling the company until a change of heart prompts him instead to attempt buying back control, unable to let go of the chance to prove he can get back on top.

For a film that eventually finds its way to the shores of greatness, Highest 2 Lowest gets off to a bafflingly rough start. An adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low, it ricochets from a corporate thriller to a crime one when David gets a call that his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been taken hostage, with the culprit demanding a $17.5 million ransom that will drain the funds David has borrowed and leveraged for his deal. The twist is that the kidnapper accidentally grabbed the wrong boy — Kyle (Elijah Wright), Trey’s friend and the only child of his driver and right hand man Paul (Jeffrey Wright). David, who was ready to sacrifice everything he and his family have for his own kid, has to figure out whether he’s willing to do the same for someone else’s. It’s a scenario primed for intense moral grappling, but Highest 2 Lowest turns these events into laborious, hourlong exposition. Alan Fox’s script is rife with clunkers (the somnolent Ilfenesh Hadera, as David’s wife Pam, explains with haunting detail which items of decor on the dining table can be moved where by the police), and the intrusive score is the equivalent of garish wall-to-wall carpeting. The glassy sleekness of the Kings’ Dumbo penthouse and Manhattan offices, combined with all the shots of the skyline, makes the first act feel like a promotional video for an offering no one ever gets around to mentioning.

Then Highest 2 Lowest takes to the streets of the city that David claims to love but has spent the last years hovering over, and it’s like the movie finally begins — and when it does, it bounds forward with a thrilling vibrancy. After all that talk, a lot of it done by David to himself, Highest 2 Lowest plunges into a subway setpiece that combines a ransom dropoff with the Puerto Rican Day Parade and a Yankees game. The nail-biting suspense of the mission blurs into the joyous bustle to the point where the movie itself is equal parts dread and celebration. Things kick into another gear entirely when A$AP Rocky, also known as Rakim Mayers, turns up as Yung Felon, an aspiring rapper who planned this wild act of extortion out of resentment, admiration, and desperation. Mayers has acted a few times before, in the 2018 indie Monster and this year’s Sundance favorite If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but his turn in Highest 2 Lowest really makes the case that movie stardom is his if he wants it. His scenes are all with Washington, who he manages to jolt fresh energy out of, as the two face off in sequences that are part rap battle, part therapy session.

It’s when Mayers turns up that Highest 2 Lowest feels like it actually settles on what it’s about. It’s a film full of sons — like Trey, David’s thoroughbred successor raised in comfort and without the tensions his father experienced in youth, and Kyle, the godson that David’s helped take care of but has to decide how much he owes. Yung Felon, who David hasn’t met until the kidnapping sets them on a collision course, turns out to be another sort of son, because he’s built David up in his mind as a surrogate absentee father, a figure whose attention he’s been longing for, and who sees him as a potential savior as well as a foe to be defeated. Highest 2 Lowest is about legacy — about what you owe the audience you’ve cultivated, and what you owe yourself. Both Lee and Washington are enormously influential figures who still have plenty of working years ahead of them, but like David, they have to figure out whether that time is best spent chasing what’s successful or what’s of interest to them. Highest 2 Lowest reminds us, however clumsily, of how much the entertainment industry has shifted, with mentions of the attention economy and the internet. Then it turns around and makes a vivid argument on behalf of going out and doing what you love, whether anyone else agrees with you or not. It’s an assertion made as much with images as with words — a fan leading a chant about Boston sucking on the stalled train, a performance from Eddie Palmieri and the Salsa Orchestra, and Washington nodding along to a singer he loves, proving you’re only as old as you feel.