Whether or not you remember how it ends, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely been unable to shake how He Got Game begins. Spike Lee’s film opens on soaring, enormous images of unrepentantly American cities and plains, with men and women of every color—but mostly men, and mostly black and white—pictured in backyards and fields, on boardwalks, beside abandoned gas stations, and in fenced-off basketball courts neighboring the projects. They’re shooting hoops: posing, dribbling, showing off, bodies jostling against each other, breathing the sport of basketball to life in wondrous slow motion.
It’s a credit sequence that doubles as a mission statement. First: this sport is beautiful. And the bodies playing it are united in this beauty, even as time, space, gender, and color differentiate them. Next: this is a story broad enough to encompass street ball, the pro leagues, and everything and everyone in between, from the shadows of the Twin Towers to the prairies, to Chicago’s since-demolished Cabrini-Green projects. The opening sequence is practically an anthem in images. There’s more at stake here, it tells us, than merely the travails of man and sport.
Just listen to the music. By 1998, Lee had established himself as a director with, among other things, an incisive musical palette: films like Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing are as memorable for their evocative needle drops—Stevie Wonder and Public Enemy, respectively—as they are for their politics or Lee’s whirligig visual style. But even by those standards, He Got Game’s opening moments are daringly incongruous. The opening credits are scored not to music of the moment, but to the clamoring, industrial lyricism of “John Henry,” Aaron Copland’s 1940 symphonic portrait of the 19th-century black folk hero and steel driver who, the story goes, took American labor capital to task in a one-man race against a steam-powered hammer.
It’s a pointed choice, echoed throughout in further Copland selections, largely from his masterpiece Appalachian Spring. It doesn’t fit—but doesn’t it? He Got Game will tell the story of a young basketball star named Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by professional baller Ray Allen, then of the Milwaukee Bucks), who goes to Abraham Lincoln High School and plays for the “Railsplitters”—an odd name for a basketball team, unless, I suppose, you’re a character in a Spike Lee movie. John Henry, it should be remembered, is for African-Americans a symbol of might and moral certitude in the face of exploitation, among other things. Jesus Shuttlesworth, meanwhile, is the No. 1 high-school prospect in the country, and as dramatized by Lee’s righteous, sensationalistic film, the choices before him—college, or pro? And if college, which school?—ensure that he, too, become a symbol of exploitation.
Courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection.
The movie piles it on. A trusted coach tries to buy Jesus’s confidence by paying his rent and offering him $10,000 “loans.” An N.B.A. agent tries to buy him off with Ferraris and a watch worth at least a year of college tuition. College hosts try to ply him with alcohol and a parade of indistinguishable coeds. His own girlfriend, Lala (Rosario Dawson), and the uncle who’s taken care of him and his sister since his father was sent to prison for the murder of his mother, are in on it, too. So, in his own way, is Jesus’s father, Jake (Denzel Washington), who’s been released on the condition that he nudge his son to choose the right school.
In the 20 years since its release, He Got Game’s reputation has ebbed with the culture. It failed to become a box-office hit and was released to mixed enthusiasm; even some of its positive notices were condescending, a posture that’s plagued Lee’s work since the beginning. The movie was too long, too loose, and, per the director’s films broadly, too on the nose with anger. David Edelstein, writing for Slate, praised it for sustaining an energy and mythopoetic grandeur that made it fun to watch, but noted it was an uphill battle in the context of Lee’s work. “The hope is always there,” wrote Edelstein—speaking for many, one gathers—“that Lee will transcend his anger and egotism and paranoia and make a film that feels organic.” By those standards, it’s a wonder He Got Game passed muster.
But that, I think, is why I love it—why I keep returning to it. The anger, egotism, and paranoia lend themselves to a movie as rich and various as the country it’s about. The movie combines prison melodrama, domestic soap opera, ESPN-esque hype reels, and the monied aspirationalism of 90s hip-hop videos to bear on a plot that twines the moral redemption of a black American felon—and the reconciliation of a father and son—with a loaded racial critique of the commerce of basketball. It’s a sprawling but enduring snapshot of its era.
