81. Deep Cover

“Now gather ‘round as I lay it down.” So begins Bill Duke’s startling Deep Cover, a gritty police thriller. Deep Cover was made during the short-lived Black film boom that followed the success of Boyz N the Hood, and it holds up very well. Duke shows the keen visual sense, penchant for luridness, and cross-cultural specificity that made his theatrical feature debut, A Rage in Harlem, such a unique treat. But here, he expands his scope, courageously critiquing the federal government’s cynically conceived and hypocritical “war on drugs.”

A decade before Steven Soderbergh remade Traffic, Duke created a brutally effective work that names names and puts its somewhat familiar undercover cop storyline in an incisively global context. The script, by Michael Tolkin (The Player) and Henry Bean (The Believer), is smart and mordantly witty, focusing on Russell Stevens, Jr., a conflicted Black undercover narcotics agent (Laurence Fishburne, in the last film in which he was billed as “Larry”) on special assignment for the DEA.

The film slyly subverts the typical Black/white “buddy” action movie dynamic. Fishburne’s unflappable cool (even more astounding when the veneer shatters) plays hilariously off of Jeff Goldblum’s rattling insecurity as the increasingly manic David Jason, a wealthy Jewish attorney whose craving for wealth, power, and, most dangerously, respect, draws him deep into the drug game. The filmmakers don’t soft-pedal Jason’s ethnicity any more than they downplay the important role race plays in Stevens’ conflicted worldview.

While many of the film’s characters -- including Roger Guenveur Smith’s doomed would-be smoothie, Clarence Williams III’s proselytizing patrolman, and Gregory Sierra’s flip, vicious Latin drug lord -- border on cliché, the writing and the performances are sharp enough to transcend the movie’s B-movie trappings. Stevens’ meteoric rise to the top of the food chain strains credulity a bit, but it serves a necessary thematic function. Deep Cover is a memorable film that features sharp direction, the most complex and interesting work of two fine actors, and a story that still needs to be heard. (Josh Ralske)