Slam

Not only does Slam strike me as one of the best films about being a writer I've ever seen, it is also the least sentimental coming-of-age movie to come along in years. [06 Nov 1998, p.19]

Directed and cowritten by Marc Levin with an intentionally untidy, restless, handheld style that owes a lot to his background as a documentary filmmaker, Slam effectively gets at the deadly, no-way-out despair that can squeeze a man as he realizes he’s become a numbered nobody in the huge, imperfect justice system. Levin’s best idea, though, is to counterbalance that hopelessness with freeing blasts of verse, performed with such drama and passion that audiences may want to break into applause.

What Slam possesses is real passion, and that is in short supply in movies these days.

Slam, directed by Marc Levin, is schematic but effective as it makes its points about African Americans caught in the Washington, D.C., criminal justice system. It's got a wonderful eye and, for a film, ear.

Slam is a film about rap poetry, romance and gangster culture that blends melodrama, visceral excitement -- and a lot of preaching. [23 Oct 1998, p.D3]

It's flat, unrevealing, but powerfully sincere. [11 Apr 1999, p.6]

Although it begins promisingly enough, with a documentary-like look at the options available to young African-American men who grow up in the "ghetto life," this visually polished film stumbles when it comes to actually telling a story.