Crooklyn is quite a unique film in Spike Lee’s body of work. Written by Lee and siblings Cinque and Joie Susannah Lee, it’s his most autobiographical film, and draws heavily from his childhood in 1970s Brooklyn. That makes it one of his most tender and least didactic works as well – a relaxed counterpart to Do the Right Thing that’s all vibes, a hangout film that occasionally approaches a sitcom, even though it does lapse into tragedy at times too. In place of a conventional narrative, Lee beautifully structures the film around the beats and rhythms of a family closely based on his own – mother Carolyn, played by Alfre Woodard, father Woody, played by Delroy Lindo, and children Troy (Zelda Harris), Joseph (Tse-Mach Washington), Clinton (Carlton Williams), Wendell (Sharif Rashed) and Nate (Christopher Knowings). We see events mainly from the perspective of Troy, the only girl in the family, as she tries to figure out her mother Carolyn’s character and her own role in the household. While Troy can be assertive and knows how to hold her own, she’s mainly a watcher and listener, alive to the hushed strangeness of the adult world, and curious about its mysteries. She’s especially attuned to the flux of her family, a result of their precarious position on the cusp of middle-class security; Woody was once a successful musician but has made a decision to only play his own compositions, which has dried up the family’s income. They may own their Brooklyn brownstone, and act as landlords to the other tenants, but they cannot always afford electricity, and live with the constant threat of downward mobility.
To place Crooklyn alongside Do the Right Thing is thus to produce Lee’s vision or theory of what the neighborhood film can be to black communities. Whereas classical Hollywood often used the neighborhood genre to evoke the cohesion of ethnic enclaves and New Hollywood focused on dissolution within the inner city, Lee presents the neighborhood as a continuous oscillation between these two forces, with these two films placing the emphasis and rhythm in slightly different places. Do the Right Thing diagnoses the neighborhood over a single day as it moves from community to chaos even as the sense of community is what persists; Crooklyn immerses us in communal textures but gestures towards the limiting factors, which remain on the fringes much as the concerns of the adult world are not quite legible to a child’s perspective. Likewise, Do the Right Thing captures the synchronic intensity of a single extraordinary day against the backdrop of routines that remain the same day after day, whereas Crooklyn presents us with the accumulated experiences of many ordinary days but with an acute taste for the peaks and troughs, the tipping-points and quilting-points, that give that diachronic continuum shape over time. Crooklyn is the neighborhood in Spring, Do the Right Thing is the neighborhood in summer, and both are fundamentally interested in what Raymond Williams described as “knowable communities,” groups that retain their internal legibility against the rapacious demands of the inner city.
In both films that legibility of the neighborhood, that sense of knowing and being known by one’s neighbors, produces a sweeping urban pastoral that, in Crooklyn, is further intensified for being filtered through the golden hues of childhood. Set against the backdrop of the 1973 Knicks win, and suffused with nostalgic textures that never devolve into sentimentality, Crooklyn may be the most vital of all of Lee’s New York memory palaces, shot through with sensory richness, the synaesthetic overload of childhood, as the neighborhood becomes a form of kaleidoscopic hyperstimulation, a breathless realm in which everything is being discovered for the first time. Lee evokes this through a remarkably raucous soundscape in which people are usually talking over each other – there are an average of four people speaking at once in each scene – to create a sonic flow that ensures even the most drastic moments, such as when Woody temporarily leaves home, don’t amount to catastrophe, but just fold back into the ebb and flow of neighborhood life. No doubt this noise is occasionally exhausted, as when a family feud leads to the seven of them collapsing exhausted on their staircase, too tired to continue the fighting, but there’s always a sense of energy stored up, a reservoir of childhood ebullience just around the corner.
In Henri Lefebvre’s terms then, Lee performs a rhythmanalysis of the neighborhood. The opening scenes are a sustained montage sequence accompanied by a series of 60s and 70s classics that culminate with Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” but this climactic moment doesn’t pivot to the story proper, or drop us from montage back into narrative realism. Instead, the montage simply decelerates a little only to pick up again shortly after, and this pattern of slowing and quickening montage is what constitutes the film, which often plays as a series of loose music videos that emerge, inchoate and impressionistic, from the depth of the Lee family’s collective memory. The most important thing, in the neighborhood, is to be able to maintain your rhythm, defend your flow, continue the soundtrack that is playing in your head, and so the stand-offs here feel less combative than in Do the Right Thing, and less arranged around racial lines too, instead reflecting the musicality needed to be properly known and to know others in turn; a form of neighborliness. In fact, the Lees seem to suggest, only this musical braggadocio can traverse identity lines, vividly demonstrated when we shift from Tony Eyes (David Patrick Williams), a neurotic gay man, being tormented by hood children, to a black trans woman dancing and vogueing fearlessly in a local supermarket, while the same children look on in awe. Woody’s refusal to play any music but his own becomes both a purification and a betrayal of this neighborhood ethos, which demands each person move according to their own rhythm, but also thrives on polyrhythm, on productive dissonance, on a pluralistic overlap of voices.
In the same way that the Lees seem to be thinking through how their adult hindsight throws the originality of the neighborhood in greater relief, we as the audience only recognise its uniqueness when Troy spends a holiday with her extended family in Virginia. The only real didacticism in the film comes from these relatives, who are successfully rather than aspirationally middle class. Lee presents them as passing for white; they rake out Troy’s braids, caution her to speak properly, and their home is clad in tasteful pastels rather than the pan-African brightness of Brooklyn. After the cacophony of most of the film, the quietness of their home is deafening, and intensified by the distorted aspect ratio that Lee uses here, which squeezes more into the screen to capture the panoramic promise and claustrophobic reality of this particular version of bourgeois Blackness. Compressing people into the vertical plane, this ratio precludes the horizontal sprawl, the collapse of public and private, the polyrhythmic messiness of Brooklyn. More fundamentally, it draws a sharp distinction between inside and outside – or ensures that there is no real outside – in stark contrast to the neighborhood, which subsists on stoops, storefront, sidewalks and hydrants.
Accordingly, Troy spends most of her time in Virginia trying to figure out whether this outside exists – or attempting to map where the bourgeois “inside” of her relatives reaches its limit. To that end, she releases the family dog and then follows her aunt as she searches the perimeter of the property; or rather, as her aunt’s anxiety blurs and dissolves the perimeters of the property, allowing room for the chaotic and mobile cinematography of the Brooklyn sequences to finally invade this cloistered Virginian space. In perhaps the most provocative decision in the film, Troy actually murders this same dog by trapping it inside her fold-up bed, as if to invert the logic of bourgeois sequestration once and for all. To have what Jane Jacobs described as “eyes on the street,” a properly collective sense of neighborhood, it’s apparently not enough to be able to hold your own – you have to be prepared for this kind of anarchic violence, if only to keep the crushing spectre of gentrification at bay, and so with the burial of the dog Troy graduates into a young adult.
Having realized the uniqueness of Brooklyn, you’d think that Troy’s return home would be cathartic but the brilliance of Lee’s film is that he chooses this exact moment to meditate on what returning home actually means, especially for black communities. For when Troy returns to Brooklyn she discovers the real reason for her sojourn in Virginia – her mother has cancer and has moved to hospital, never to return. Whereas Virginia is unhomely in its combination of hospitality and detachment, Brooklyn now becomes genuinely uncanny, whether in the quietness and emptiness of the brownstone in the wake of Carolyn’s death, or in Lee’s shift to spaces and angles that we haven’t seen before, notably a crane shot of the children wandering aimlessly up the Fort Greene Park stairs, which are not all that distant geographically from the neighbourhood but which feel like an entirely different visual syntax here, monumentalist and brutalist in their enormous voids and sightlines.
However, with her death Carolyn also imparts two crucial lessons to Troy (and the audience) about home, neighbourhood and nostalgia. Her first revelation is that home has never been a physical place but a shared rhythm that Troy starts to rediscover following her mother’s wake; indeed, rediscovering this rhythm is what becoming an adult is all about. Lee reserves the ultimate tribute to endurance, the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child” for this resumption, as spine-tingling in its vision of collective futures now as on the day it was recorded, which is perhaps what allows it to project the film back into the present moment, since it functions as a prequel to the eponymous hip hop track by the Crooklyn Dodgers that closes out the credits. This paves the way for Troy’s second lesson, which is that black solidarity hinges on what Svetlana Boym described as the distinction and tension between restorative and reflective nostalgia. For Boym, restorative nostalgia is the drive to physically restore the home we have lost and we see this impulse play out in Lee’s meticulous recreations of 1970s Brooklyn in the first half of the film. Yet these memory palaces become all the more poignant for Lee and Troy’s shift to what Boym describes as reflective nostalgia – the recognition that home was always a shared cadence that continues into the present.
Of course, this continuation comes with modulations and alterations, and so Lee’s final invitation to his audiences is to continue inhabiting their former neighbourhoods through evolving repetition and rhythm rather than stagnant preservation and elegy. Rhythms, Lee reminds us, can be custodial, adopted and transformed by new generations and new media, in the same way his cinematic language absorbs the signifyin’ of the street, the five pillars of hip hop. While home cannot ever be recreated it can continue to be performed long after the people who initially shaped it are no longer with us, much as the warmth of the family here is only intensified when the power finally gives out and they’re forced to flood their brownstone with candelight. And it is this revelation that makes Crooklyn feel like Lee’s purest distillation of the Copeland-esque American pastoral, usually so associated with white American mythologies, that floods his body of work. For the message of Copeland’s most iconic tunes is uncannily similar to Lee’s – that the heroic (or “heroic”) moments of American community-building may have receded to the past, but everyday Americans can still reinvent and build upon their rhythms. From Gatsby to MAGA, that tension between restorative and reflective nostalgia, between returning to an idealised past and finding rhythms for idealism in the present, is at the heart of the American experience, and for Lee, those threads apotheosise with African-Americans, the most American of all Americans.