Deliver Us from Eva; Biker Boyz

Motown means different things to different people. But few pop fans seem to get what really makes that 60s music movement special. Writer-director Gary Hardwick comes closer than most when he begins Deliver Us from Eva with a Motown tribute—the film’s cast is dressed in 60s styles, dancing and lipsynching to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s 1968 single "You’re All I Need (To Get By)." It’s not the harder 1994 cover version by Method Man and Mary J. Blige but the old, classic r&b threnody, bringing back an era in which black ardor was entwined with romantic notions of social advancement. It’s a rock-critic cliche to say that Motown was watered-down black pop, made to appease white record buyers (thus giving esthetic preference to Stax’s gut-bucket r&b). But Hardwick correctly hears striving and ambition in Motown and relates it to the buppie world of Deliver Us from Eva.

This detail is crucial to understanding Eva as not just amusing but authentic. Hardwick, who previously wrote and directed The Brothers and did rewrite work on Two Can Play That Game, has almost singlehandedly erected a genre of black screwball comedy. His films are clearly sexual (or at least flirtatious) but they’re also insistently social. The class status of Hardwick’s characters goes blissfully against the usual black urban stereotype, yet few people have taken his middle-class representation seriously. Like the post-Depression atmosphere of such classic Hollywood screwballs as My Man Godfrey and Holiday, class is not Hardwick’s subject. It is—subtly—ambience, the essence of the fantasy that prosperity is just around the corner, with African-American affluence and happiness within the grasp of Hardwick’s characters and audience.

You can go to Eva and breathe easy, watching rapper LL Cool J take a bet to woo the shrewish Eva (Gabrielle Union) and overcome. It’s not deep like John Berry’s 1974 love story Claudine, which went underneath black welfare cliches to reveal the humanity that gets obscured by political bias. Rather, Eva very importantly offers the romance of black aspiration. Eva’s a civil-service health inspector who falls for LL’s upwardly mobile produce-delivery man. For Hardwick, their solvency is as important as companionship. In the end, it may not be as important as a screwball like Bringing Up Baby, which dissected courtship with Moliere and Mozart profundity, but it brings black-starred films out of the blaxploitation and hiphop ghetto. Gabrielle Union is suitably gorgeous; she recalls Gene Tierney’s beauty and shallowness but is probably a better actress—though not the whip Vivica A. Fox was in Two Can Play That Game. LL Cool J doesn’t match Morris Chestnut’s suavity in that film but, hey, he’s LL, the credible butt of Union’s many "meat" double entendres. And though LL’s only a passable actor, he’s appealing to watch even if here, before he became cut and vascular, his bald head resembles a 10-pound garbanzo bean.

Biker Boyz/> Directed By Reggie Rock By The Wood

Originality is the last quality you’d pin on Biker Boyz even though its subject—black motorcycle gangs in contemporary Los Angeles—has never been shown in the movies before. Yet director-writer Reggie Rock Bythewood goes through familiar plot moves—veteran biker Smoke (Laurence Fishburne) is challenged by a young upstart Kid (Derek Luke); the Black Knights M.C. race their rivals the Strays M.C.—and what isn’t original is suffused with an unexpected, hobbled passion.

All the action flicks that Bythewood has seen can be felt in the way he amasses old-movie references and then uses them sincerely. (During the past three decades, low pop culture has formed the imaginative foundation for many young black filmgoers.) Smoke and Kid’s father-son conflict isn’t simply a cliche; it’s a myth Bythewood took from Howard Hawks’ Red River, then put into a new, confessional context. He turns noir atmosphere into something optimistic. The black-on-black visual style—leather, skin, night—hypes up this subculture within a subculture. It becomes a metaphor for an unofficial America, showcasing ghetto insularity. This film’s dark machismo reveals the subconscious ego connections between young and aging black men.

Biker Boyz sees more than zoom-zoom in the world of bikes. The same role-model search that Denzel Washington hoked up in Antwone Fisher comes across here as dreamlike, haunting. Instead of simply putting black characters through old action-hero paces, Bythewood’s pop mythology gives texture—esthetic validation—to their emotional lives. He starts with a convocation of the bike clubs much like that in the fabled opening of Walter Hill’s The Warriors. There’s even an announcer figure, Soul Train (Orlando Jones), orating like The Warriors’ Cyrus. The initial parade of bikes—a Honda V-Twin 1000, a 1300cc sports bike, Harleys, Triumphs and various choppers—recalls the phosphorescent spectacle of The Fast and the Furious, the most recent template for Bythewood’s multicultural world.

The film’s bizarre thesis is based on a 2000 New Times Los Angeles article by Michael Gougis that explored real life African-American motorcycle clubs. Biker Boyz seeks to legitimize this subculture’s uniqueness (Gougis described them as having more in common with the Rotary Club than the Hells Angels). Actually, it’s not unlike the all-American story that was told more conventionally in Drumline. But Bythewood upholds trash culture, whereas Drumline’s director, Charles Stone III, used college marching bands to examine the complexities of black advancement—pop vs. the classics, the street vs. the academy. That more realistic focus made Drumline a politicized drama while Biker Boyz is sheer fantasma. But weird fantasma. Smoke and the Kid’s big showdown—a race filmed in the style of the old Speed Racer cartoons—takes place at Bunche Ranch (intentionally invoking pioneering black diplomat Ralph Bunche). It expresses Bythewood’s belief in the low culture of today’s black Hollywood as an accelerated form of social advancement. That explains the Black Knights’ motto, "Burn rubber not your soul," coming from Bythewood, whose first credits include the trashy tv series New York Undercover and the script for Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus.

After an edifying mainstream hit like Drumline, I never imagined cheering a filmmaker who advised "Get on the Bike," but Biker Boyz steers clear of exploitation. From the way Bythewood begins, pacing fast action to slow music (the Mahavishnu Orchestra), it’s apparent that he intends an exotic view of the cultural rituals that determine black manhood. His faith in action- movie tropes isn’t just a commercial convenience; his ingrained attraction to action films is stronger than his interest in the world of cycling. Bythewood implies that action tropes can also speak for the experience of people who express themselves in unconventional ways. (When Smoke bears down on a road, his determination is shown as a form of concentrated tunnel-vision.) In Biker Boyz, maverick modes of social achievement and camaraderie supersede today’s absence of stimulating political choices. The cycle clubs Black Knights, Strays, Soul Brothers, Bone Deep, Chosen Few are modern alternatives to Panthers, SNCC, Bloods, Crips. This insightful notion can coexist in the multiplexes alongside Drumline because it, too, credibly dramatizes different manners of male behavior—the best thing Bythewood could have learned from Red River.

Biker Boyz’s subject is so unusual and fascinating it might have been better without Bythewood’s hype. Sketching Kid’s homelife through more pop myths (a beautiful instant girlfriend, a mother dilemma out of Maury Povich) once again leaves Derek (Antwone Fisher) Luke tangled in cliches. Yet something’s irresistible about seeing Bythewood convene Luke, Fishburne and several recent generations of black pop actors (including Djimon Hounsou as the biker Motherland, Eriq La Salle as Slick Will, Terence Howard as Chu Chu). They’re all slickly stylized and emblematic of that particular Hollywood dilemma in which men balance paying the rent with making believe. That’s what I meant when I described the film’s "hobbled passion." Biker Boyz romanticizes the idiosyncrasy of black nonconformists, and though Bythewood does so with palpable conviction—and sympathy—his movie-fed terms of honor don’t account for the everyday struggle he ignores. The trick to using myths in movies is making them illuminate personal and social reality. Bythewood’s not ready yet.