‘Highest 2 Lowest’

The film opens,​ as the credits roll down the screen, with shots of present-day downtown Manhattan. The chief angle of vision is on the balcony of an expensive penthouse in Dumbo, as a part of Brooklyn is now called. The name recalls Walt Disney, of course, but like many New York neighbourhoods (SoHo, Tribeca) has a more literal or lettered source in the words ‘down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass’. The penthouse is about as far as it gets from this gritty nickname.

Night ends, the sun rises and we get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. With impeccable inappropriateness, except for the weather, a male voice sings the opening number from the musical Oklahoma! A few moments later, when the narrative action begins, the main character says: ‘It is a beautiful day,’ as if he has just heard the soundtrack.

We begin to look for different connections. We hear ‘all the sounds of the earth are like music,’ which could be turned into ‘Music is what matters here.’ The song announces: ‘Everything’s goin’ my way.’ Our hero, with a little adaptation, could say the same: ‘Everything’s comin’ my way, most of it terrible.’

The film is Highest 2 Lowest, written by Alan Fox and directed by Spike Lee. Our hero, David King (Denzel Washington), is often referred to as King David. He’s rich, the owner of the penthouse, and for a while exceptionally cheery. He’s the founder of Stackin’ Hits, a famous record company, which he sold five years ago and is about to buy back. He has new ideas. He chats with his beautiful, supportive wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), who a little later defines herself as ‘loving and silent’. Then he leaves for work in Manhattan, dropping off his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), at a summer basketball clinic.

Now the film begins to reveal its method, which is to allow each story to be hijacked by another before it’s settled in. An invitation to this method can be found in Lee’s predecessors; the film is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which is a loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom (1959). But Lee turns it into a genuine scamper, where the scampering becomes the point. This is one of the recurring pleasures of his films. He likes to mix genres and return to places and people. I’m thinking now particularly of Da 5 Bloods (2018), but similar effects occur in much, perhaps most, of his work. Kurosawa’s film also opens with shots across a river and a conversation in a penthouse. But the business being discussed is shoes rather than music, and while remaining faithful to much of the plot, Lee has made a quite different movie, marked by elegant allusions rather than debt.

We might say that visually and aurally the movie’s high point is a hectic Puerto Rican Day celebration near the Yankee Stadium, with amazing, uninterrupted music by the late Eddie Palmieri and his band. The other plots have no effect here, whatever drama and damage they cause elsewhere.

Elsewhere begins a few hours after King has dropped off Trey. King’s phone rings and the voice on the other end of the line announces that his son has been kidnapped. The caller names a ransom figure, which is the exact amount King was going to pay to buy his company back: $17.5 million. An interesting sideline, later explained by a policewoman (LaChanze), is that the money is to be delivered in Swiss currency because it has thousand-franc notes – a lot easier to carry in a rucksack than the equivalent in dollars. There is a good piece of high-resolution dialogue. The voice on the phone tells King: ‘You not God no more, nigga. I am.’

The situation quickly changes. Trey has not been kidnapped. His friend Kyle (Elijah Wright), who is the son of King’s driver (Jeffrey Wright), has been taken by mistake. Like their sons, King and his driver were childhood friends. The film lapses into a sticky, unpleasant moral drama about whether King is ready to pay the ransom for someone else’s son – he is, but not straightaway. One of his colleagues says he has ‘the best ears in the business … but the coldest heart’.

Then we get back on track with the arrangements. Their execution provides the dramatic and visual centre of the film, funny and scary at the same time. The drop-off point for the cash is in the Bronx, somewhere near the Yankee Stadium – we don’t know about the Puerto Ricans yet. King and the police and the money will take the subway. Another policeman will drive uptown, ready to arrest the villain as soon as the handover has taken place and Kyle is released. This doesn’t happen easily.

But the masterpiece of film and fun does. This is the delivery of the rucksack. King is carrying it and late in the journey is told to go and stand, with the bag, on the coupling between two trains. Someone pulls the emergency brake and the train shudders to a halt. The rucksack falls between the carriages. A masked figure picks it up and once outside the station gives it to a figure on a moped, who in turn gives it to another, who in turn … The policeman in the car can see this and is following it, but the Latino celebration fills the streets and holds him up a little. In the end he does catch the relevant malefactor, and finds the bag, but it’s empty except for some tampons.

Kyle is released, but he’s hurt and has to go to hospital. The money is still missing, but King recognises a voice on a recorded song and knows who has it. He is Yung Felon (played by A$AP Rocky), a rapper who admires King and has been trying to catch his attention for a long time. The police pay no heed to any of this; their general approach is to treat victims as annoying customers rather than people they are trying to help.

The solution by music is stylish and just as appropriate as Oklahoma! is not. But the film gets a little lost here, as if it’s waiting for a traffic light to change or doesn’t know how to end a tale except by invading it with another. Fortunately, there’s more music. Yung Felon, now in prison, gets to sing his song to King. Back home King listens to Sula (Aiyana-Lee Anderson), an event many people, including Trey, have been trying to make happen since the film began. The song she sings is called ‘Highest 2 Lowest’. One of the complexities of King’s character is that, as he has acquired wealth, he has also risen into a realm of ‘good’ taste – one that can count Oklahoma! as a ‘classic’, despite its racism, while simultaneously distancing him from the new, edgy Black music embodied by Yung Felon.

The most memorable music in the film is a song by McFadden and Whitehead, its beat and chords suggesting a march in a hurry, a rocky partner to Eddie Palmieri’s offering. It would be unwise to verbalise too confidently the feeling we get from this tune, but its energy and urgency are unmistakable. This is true of Yung Felon’s song too, even if King is not taken with it. There is none of the delay that haunts the film’s plot and imagery. These sounds are getting there, wherever ‘there’ is, and the only road is music. I didn’t know when I wrote these words that the song is called ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’.