Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” takes some time to find its groove. But once it does, when the film leaves the high rises and puts its feet on the New York pavement, it really sings.
A reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime thriller “High and Low,” Lee brings the story to a modern-day New York where a music mogul, played by Denzel Washington, is faced with a moral dilemma: Save a kidnapped kid or his flagging empire. Both will cost nearly everything he has.
We toss around the term “auteur” pretty casually these days. It’s become almost a shorthand for any filmmaker with an ounce of style. But “Highest 2 Lowest” is a film that has Lee’s DNA in every frame — a symphonic blend of his influences and passions: cinema, New York City, sports, Black stories, great needle drops and, of course, Washington. It’s easy enough to just go along for the ride, trusting that it will end up somewhere worthwhile, even when the green screen is a little off, the score a little distracting or the dialogue a little unnatural.
But it will require some audience patience nonetheless. In its first half, “Highest 2 Lowest” plays a bit like a melodrama crossed with a sitcom, where the beats are stilted and the dialogue feels like dialogue. There’s an awkward artificiality to the whole thing, which is likely more metaphor than accident, but it’s also not the most engaging stretch.
Washington’s character David King is a music executive and founder of a record label whose biggest days are behind him. You wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at his palatial apartment with its panoramic views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline, but the money isn’t exactly coming in like it used to. The realities of the music business, social media and the attention economy have muddled the plot. The guy who once had the “best ears in the business” can’t seem to get a handle on what works anymore. He has the chance to cash out and sell the business, but against the wishes of everyone around him, decides he wants to take back ownership of the thing he created.
When his beautiful wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, either miscast or terribly underwritten) says she’s going to pledge half a million dollars to an arts organization, he asks her to hold off. “But we’ve always supported young Black artists,” she replies, though you suspect part of the worry is about keeping up appearances. Things come into focus quickly, however, when David learns that his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped. The ransom is $17.5 million.
There is a twist, which perhaps shouldn’t be spoiled, but it soon becomes less obvious to the Kings whether they should pay up. It’s an interesting conundrum, and a potent one for these greedy times, but also difficult to empathize with on a certain level. This is a guy with a lot of assets to his name and the ability to get his hands on $17.5 million. For the audience, the choice will seem obvious. It’s never quite clear what his life will look like if that money disappears, but the bottom doesn’t seem like a possibility.
But this is all just a lead up to the more exciting and compelling cat-and-mouse portion of the film, where the kidnapper, an aspiring, down-on-his-luck rapper named Yung Felon (played by a magnetic A$AP Rocky ) is finally introduced. His showdown with King is fun, tense and even includes a rap battle. A$AP Rocky more than holds his own with Washington.
In a different timeline, in a world where King listened to as many new artists as he did when he was starting out, their stories might have been different. Yung Felon might have been discovered, instead of just being one of the aggrieved talents languishing in obscurity and plotting violent revenge.
There is a lot going on in Alan Fox’s script for “Highest 2 Lowest,” which attempts to present a realistic picture of New York and all its contradictions, from the billionaire boardrooms to the Puerto Rican festivals in the Bronx to the lively Yankees fans on the subway. Jeffrey Wright, who also gets some great scenes with Washington, plays King’s friend and driver, Paul. He too is looking for his son Kyle (real-life son Elijah Wright) but gets far less respect and attention from the cops. The inequalities and prejudices run deep, and at a certain point David and Paul set off on their own to solve the case, vigilantes in a Rolls-Royce. “Highest 2 Lowest” may not reach the heights of some of Lee’s best films, but it’s the kind film that makes you hope Lee and Washington have more to make together.
“Highest 2 Lowest,” an A24 release in theaters Friday and streaming on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout and brief drug use.” Running time: 133 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
