Stream It Or Skip It?

Highest 2 Lowest (now streaming on Apple TV+) may be Spike Lee’s latest love letter to New York City, but Mets fans may want to look away. Then again, they may not be able to avert their eyes from Lee’s reunion with Denzel Washington, the two stalwarts collaborating for the fifth time, the first since 2006’s terrific Inside Man, for an interpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police-procedural classic High and Low. Although Highest 2 Lowest might be Lee’s most accessible work since Inside Man, it wasn’t a box office hit like that film – it’s a co-production of A24 and Apple, who briefly put it in theaters before funneling it to streaming. Which is odd, considering how hands-down entertaining it is, with a big movie star (maybe the biggest) doing big things in a scenario that’s as purely cinematic as anything you’ll see all year.

The Gist: The irony begins early as “O’ What a Beautiful Mornin’’ accompanies Highest 2 Lowest’s opening establishing shots of New York in all its glory. See, today, everything is not going David King’s (Washington) way, and we haven’t even gotten to the serious crime yet. Aptly named, King is a music-biz ubermogul, the founder and head of Stackin’ Hits Records. He has original Basquiats on the walls of his penthouse, platinum records functioning as wallpaper and a chauffeur driving his Rolls Royce. But he doesn’t own Stackin’ Hits anymore. He wants to change that, working to buy the majority shares of the company so the label can get back to its roots and focus on the music, instead of cashing out by selling to another conglomerate – and unlike the assumption we might make that someone in his position could become cynical about the biz, King still has the love and passion for what truly counts, the art. Easier said than done. He asks his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), to hold off on the half-mil she usually donates to charity, and he’ll have to move things around and cash out this or that account and borrow against the penthouse to retain the heart of his dream. 

King is tight with his driver, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), a devoted Muslim and ex-con who, if one reads into it a little, has been given his much-needed second chance by his employer. King’s teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph) is just as tight with Paul’s son Kyle (Wright’s son Elijah Wright). And at this point we should consider ourselves fortunate that Washington and Wright share the screen quite a bit, since they’re like kaiju to normal-sized actors – they’re big and fierce and we can’t take our eyes off them and the scenery better watch out. (And maybe it’s time to fire up their previous pairing, the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate.) Anyway. Trey and Paul are at basketball day camp as King works his angles and Paul supports him all the way and then the phone rings. A kidnapper has snatched Trey, demanding a $17.5 million ransom. Do we need to do the math? That’s 35 times as much as King asked his wife to not donate. He can drum up the cash, but the timing is horrible. Not that he wouldn’t pay it. He’s not a monster, despite my inference that the actor playing him is as mighty and awe-inspiring as Godzilla.

But there was some confusion. Turns out the kidnapper grabbed the wrong kid. He’s actually got Kyle. And now King balks at the idea of essentially donating $17.5 million to charity. Kyle is his godson. The world is watching, ready to pounce on a very famous man should he make what is absolutely obviously objectively the wrong f—ing decision. Whether the decision comes from inside King or from outside pressure isn’t certain, but he agrees to pay the ransom, and thus follows a classic Spike Lee Joint vibrant and dynamic procedural sequence in which the cops (played by Michael Potts, LaChanze and Dean Winters in full asshole mode) outline the plan to make the exchange of cash for teenage boy. Worry not, the plot goes far deeper and gets more complicated from there, but to answer the lingering question in your minds, yes, Lee makes sure the ransom money is toted past his most beloved NYC landmarks in an Air Jordan backpack. Is it the shoes? It’s always been the shoes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Culling from Lee’s oeuvre, Highest 2 Lowest merges the tension and immediacy of Inside Man with the NYC love-lurve-luff of 25th Hour and Do the Right Thing. Outside that, this is the best fictional movie about the music biz since Inside Llewyn Davis.

Performance Worth Watching: Sure, the cast is uniformly great – including a hilarious Winters saying things like “All these new rappers these days, they sound alike to me” – but if your eyes are on anyone but Washington, that tells me you’re watching the movie for the third or fourth time, scanning the screen for any cast member or visual element attempting, with futility, to infiltrate the impenetrable sphere of his presence. 

Memorable Dialogue: Paul has us wondering just how rehabilitated he might be as he ch-chks a bullet into the chamber:

King: What’s that?

Paul: Insurance. It’s Jake from State Farm.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Lee and Washington still got game, and I couldn’t be happier to shout that to the rooftops, so even the Big Apple’s poshest penthouses hear it loud and clear. Highest 2 Lowest is Lee’s most assured, vibrant and visually confident film since 25th Hour – and I say that knowing full well the power of BlacKKKlansman and Da 5 Bloods – although it functions more within the Hollywood tenor of a highly watchable thriller like Inside Man. We shouldn’t be surprised, despite Lee’s 2000s/2010s rocky stretch, which produced lesser works like Miracle at St. Anna and the curious Oldboy remake. After all, he reunites with his muse, a superstar actor who so clearly relishes this role and the chance to re-team with Lee, he doesn’t just abscond with the film, but with a sizable portion of our lives, since we’ll spend the next several days thinking about it, wrestling with it and wondering when we can carve out the time to experience it again, in all its insightful and entertaining splendor. 

The implication of Washington’s characterization of King is that he might not be where he is without the kind of compromises that put him at the decisive fulcrum of whether or not money, his business and his dream are more valuable to him than his godson’s safety. He’s compromised enough of his affection for music to reach the penthouse, and part of his arc is his attempt to claw that back, to return to that place of purity and sincerity. But at what cost might that come? And this is where Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox (again, rejiggering High and Low, itself based on Evan Hunter’s novel King’s Ransom) work through a provocative tangle of moral ironies, which begin stacking up like hit 45s in a jukebox as the director once again showcase his ability to effortlessly blend the stuff of dramas, comedies and thrillers, and establish and taffy-stretch dramatic tension.

Not that Highest 2 Lowest is necessarily a challenging work of thematic density. Sure, the film is, as ever, lined with Lee’s topical obsessions, including typically biting depictions of racial, social and economic dynamics, refreshed within the context of the rapidly evolving modern music business. But he deeply embeds those notions within the NYC setting, specifically the things he so obviously loves about the city – a central chase sequence carves through the Puerto Rican Day Parade and subway cars filled with Yankees fans chanting “BOSTON SUCKS!” Lee’s vigor and affection is on full display, and even the film’s more far-fetched moments are contrived for the sake of being highly cinematic, e.g., a critical scene between Washington and ASAP Rocky that, on the surface, plays like a rap battle, but beneath that, plays like a song of any style that you feel in your bones.

Our Call: Is Highest 2 Lowest among Lee’s best films? Time will tell. But for now it’s certainly among my favorites. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.