Movie Review: 'Clockers' (1995)

In the decade since he spearheaded the renaissance of African-American filmmaking, Spike Lee, it's startling to realize, has never made a movie that confronted the apocalyptic breakdown of life in the inner city — the drugs and gangs and fractured families, the escalating cycles of rage, murder, and despair. But now we have CLOCKERS (Universal, R), his electrifying adaptation of Richard Price's inner-city novel, and once you've seen it you may find yourself forgetting every previous drama on the subject. Produced by Martin Scorsese, Clockers doesn't look or feel like other ''Spike Lee joints.'' Inspired, perhaps, by his new cinematographer, Malik Sayeed, Lee has jettisoned most of his trademark technical razzmatazz; it's as if he were trying to burn straight through to the heart of his material. The images in Clockers are like something out of a nightmare newsreel, raw and grainy and pulsatingly alive. And the acting is free of the in-your-face raucousness that Lee, in the past, has so often confused with dramatic force. The story of a young black drug dealer who may or may not have committed a murder, Clockers is a work of staggering intelligence and emotional force — a mosaic of broken dreams.

Shifting the setting of Price's 1992 novel from a fictional New Jersey town to a crumbling neighborhood in Brooklyn, the movie pivots around the deceptively passive figure of Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a sullen 19-year-old ''clocker'' who hawks vials of crack cocaine from the benches in front of his housing project, soothing his stress-induced ulcer with sugary swigs of vanilla pop. Strike, like his fellow clockers, reports to Rodney (Delroy Lindo), a cagey middle-aged coke kingpin who runs a local junk shop as a front. Rodney has taken Strike under his wing, but he maintains his paternal grip by exacting Faustian favors. Early on, he asks Strike to do a job: He wants a young dealer who's been stealing from him murdered. A few scenes later, the dealer is lying in a fast-food parking lot, dead of four gunshot wounds.

As police gather around the blood-spattered body, the scene seems to hit us on three levels at once. There are the ugly clinical details of death that most movies keep off screen: the stench of the body, the brains splattered on the ground. There's the hideous jocularity of the cops themselves; to them, the victim is just one more dead ''yo.'' And there's a third, unspoken level of dramatic tension. Where Lee, in previous films, might have used this scene simply to score points off racist police, here he gets us to question their very ghoulishness. Could they all be this callous? (As it turns out, no.) The real theme of Clockers is the disguise worn by cops and criminals alike, the humanity that survival demands they keep under wraps.

Did Strike do the deed, as asked? Or was it his older brother, Victor (Isaiah Washington), who marches into the police station and confesses to the crime, claiming he was attacked in the parking lot? The chief investigator, Det. Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel), doesn't buy Victor's story; he thinks Strike is the killer. And Victor, a scrupulously upright young guy who's been slaving away at two jobs (including a degrading shift at a fast-food joint), all so that he can move his family out of the projects, would seem to have no motivation to commit a murder this cold-blooded. That is, unless he was trying to save his brother.