By Armond White

Idlewild

Directed by Bryan Barber

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop group, was hot about three years ago when their twice-as-long-as-necessary double-album, The Love Below/Speakerboxx, thrilled music critics looking for eccentricity in black pop. Now, no one’s looking; hip-hop has returned to one of its cyclical infatuations with street ’tude; and OutKast’s idiosyncratic novelty has worn out. But OutKast’s long-gestating feature film debut Idlewild (originally produced for HBO) finally hits the big screen in the dog days of summer. That’s because it is a dog—with a bling-bling collar. 

Despite its grinning fascination with the Jazzbo style of past eras, Idlewild takes such a flashy approach to African-American showbiz history that it winds up being absolutely ahistorical—and unsatisfying. Set in 1935 Georgia, the film follows how two homeboys, the nervy hustler Rooster (Antwan “Big Boi” Patton) and the quiet undertaker’s son Percival (Andre “3000” Benjamin), grow up to achieve success through rum-running, knife-wielding, sexy/sinister adventures at an extravagant nightclub called The Church. Patton and Benjamin, and their writer-director Bryan Barber, embrace a secular, low-down vision of Southern black folklore in order to explicitly refute the old-time gospel, churchy heritage. The big-screen bling-bling of licentious stage acts (semi-nude chorines), bawdy performers (including Macy Gray as a lesbian singer), plus the predictable assortment of fancy cars and money rolls, are all designed to appeal to contemporary hip-hop taste. 

Idlewild looks like the past, moves like the present but feels entirely fake. Anybody entertained by this hodgepodge of escapist nostalgia, shallow postmodern imagery and hip-hop cynicism is probably already corrupted by hip-hop’s corporatized insincerity. The once roots-based, quasi-political pop form has become a vehicle to promote a demoralized people’s crass materialism and soulless, individual objectives. 

If that seems like a lot of pressure to lay on a musical comedy, remember that OutKast is nothing if not ambitious, always asserting itself as different—outcast—from the other ghetto-folk of hip-hop’s Dirty South. Big Boi and Andre 3000’s moderate musical talents were inflated by their arrogant personas as Pimp and the New Prince. Idlewild confirms their pretense through its semi-autobiographical outline. Like Diana Ross, Prince and Mariah Carey before them, the stars’ rise to fame is paralleled in a simplistic showbiz chronicle. It’s self-mythologizing. But Idlewild is more offensive than Prince’s zany Under the Cherry Moon (which it rips-off at times) because instead of Prince’s private whimsy, this film attempts to re-write cultural history. Fleeting references to Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Louis Jourdan, Lena Horne and countless other pioneering black performers from the mid-20th century appear without social context. The final image of film sprockets morphing into the grooves of a vinyl record suggest that Idlewild (like OutKast and Barber himself) sprang alchemically from the crucible of pop media. It’s a key image of CGI-era insanity.

By idealizing a kind of pop parthenogenesis, Idlewild negates the heroism of black artists who persevered against a larger racist society and improved that society through sheer artistry. There is no sense in Idlewild that the theatrical period represented was once identified by the term “race music.” Barber avoids putting a single white face on the screen which, in post-Spike Lee terms, is probably a point of pride. But it’s racist; it also puts black pop in a void. Eddie Murphy did not make this error in Harlem Nights nor did Tap or White Nights, the ’80s dance musicals recently released on DVD that are now Gregory Hines’ legacy.

Barber displays a weird nostalgia for what never was. Idlewild’s fantasy of an all-black world with a self-sustaining economy has a downside: it reflects back only the egotism of the star performers who must feel that they have transcended the vicissitudes facing other blacks. Rooster and Percival do not strive for Utopia, just their own success. In this sense they’re not just outcasts with strange, artsy ideas, but outside any uplift-the-race ethics. (Their nadir: repeating Eminem’s 8 Mile mantra “You only get one shot at success!”) 

This moral confusion relates to Barber’s music-video shorthand in which flashiness obscures feeling. Like his awful “Roses” music video for OutKast, Idlewild’s stylistic barrage blends too many pop references. The story veers into true horror movie territory when Percival’s Oedipus complex leads to a combo funeral/wedding/torch-song/suicide. All too late to be redeemed either by camp or grotesquerie. In Idlewild, OutKast makes clear hip-hop’s difference from traditional black pop: There is no longer a sacred/profane conflict. Profanity has won.