A Poet in the Pokey

By RICHARD CORLISS

A film about a dope-dealing poet from the soul-squashing projects of Washington was a winner on the chic slopes and shores of this year's festivals. The poet-pusher is Ray Joshua, played by a scrawny charismatic named Saul Williams; and the film, Slam, arrives in theaters laden with laurels from Sundance and Cannes. Burdened, really, for this is a small movie, as vulnerable as it is volatile, about young black men in trouble. Its underworldly corrosiveness can't hide a heart full of hope.

In director Marc Levin's bifocal vision, Ray is a thug and a saint: he sells weed to the locals and buys ice cream for the neighborhood kids. Of course Ray will be nabbed, for a minor crime, and sent to the rathole of a D.C. jail. Another new guy, a rich Asian American (Beau Sia, scary and very funny), is so sure he'll be sprung that he spits wild invective at the screws. But Ray knows not to mouth off. Jail for him is a familiar horror: school with the toughest students and faculty.

In jail a poetry teacher named Lauren (Sonja Sohn, who can soar from a whisper to high-calorie emoting in the flick of a verb) encourages the inmates to examine the cycle of violence and put it into verse; they respond with pensive street scat like "I shot three m______f______s, and I don't know why." Well, it's a start. For Ray, it is the start of big things. He falls in love both with Lauren and with the furious folk art of slamming--a mix of hipster poetry contest and hip-hop riffing. Now Slam starts to look like a 'hooded update of The Corn Is Green and A Star Is Born. But hope is never that simple. Ray realizes that the prospect of a meaningful future can be even more frustrating than the certitude of two to five in a D.C. cell.

Shot in a wandering, often annoying quasi-documentary style that might be called faux verite, the movie sometimes seems its own slamfest of verbal and visual attitudinizing. But Levin is attentive to the rhythms and politics of street and prison life: shootings that disrupt a conversation, animosities expressed in upended food trays. Gradually, the film's earnestness pays dividends in accumulated passion; its colliding moods--dank pessimism and loopy sentimentality--finally embrace. And it's always nice to see an independent film made by people who aren't secretly angling to produce the next season of Caroline in the City. This is more like "Caroling in the Inner City," especially in a strong scene in which Ray silences rival gangs in the prison yard with his raving eloquence.

Slam has a message of desperate do-gooding. It dares to say that education helps. That poetry can teach killers a saving sweetness. That words matter. Even--especially--four-letter ones, when a gifted loser fashions them into images illuminated by the lightning of his rage and fear.