Tinged with the effulgence of hip-hop's golden age ... Sir Ben Kingsley and Josh Peck in The Wackness. Photograph: PR
Homer Simpson famously declared: "Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. That's a scientific fact." I may not share his admiration for the work of Grand Funk Railroad but I admire his certainty. I've long been convinced that hip-hop reached its zenith in 1994, and it seems that Jonathan Levine, the director of Sundance-acclaimed new movie The Wackness, agrees with me.
Charting the brief friendship between tongue-tied adolescent pot-dealer Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) and unravelling psychotherapist Dr Jeffrey Squires, The Wackness gets its drama from reliable sources -- it's a bildungsroman, a midlife-crisis story and, what's more, a long-hot-summer-that-changed-everything movie -- but its wit and charm are homegrown. I confess I was well-disposed to like it because it takes place in New York during the summer of 1994, when incoming mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced his plans to clean up the city, and hip-hop, both in the city and across America, was in its prime.
From the title down, The Wackness moves to hip-hop's beat. Two scenes should do for catalogue sales of The Notorious BIG's Ready to Die what Natalie Portman in Garden State did for the Shins -- in a nice touch, Method Man the actor nods approvingly to a Biggie track featuring Method Man the rapper.
Being a white, English student at the time, I couldn't subscribe to the lifestyle - I never, unlike Luke, used the phrase "I'm mad depressed, yo" - but I fell hard for the artistry: the storytelling, the rhymes, the beats. Hip-hop's worst impulses had not yet got the better of it. Tupac and Biggie still drew breath, Puff Daddy was just a canny producer and A&R man rather than ubiquitous pest, and the word "bling" wasn't even a gleam in Damon Dash's eye.
There seemed no limit to the genre's scope. First off, there were two contrasting masterpieces: The Notorious BIG's insolent, effortless Ready to Die. and Nas's tense, crafted Illmatic. But there was so much more, all of it a doorway into somewhere new: the arcane intricacies of Jeru the Damaja's The Sun Rises in the East (featuring the era's quintessential producer, DJ Premier), the gory black comedy of Gravediggaz' Niggamortis, the sun-baked G-Funk of Warren G's Regulate, the nascent southern rap of OutKast's Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and the earnest correctives of Common's Resurrection, not to mention Organized Konfusion, Gang Starr, Scarface, Method Man, Redman, the Roots... All rap life was there.
The Wackness cleverly contrasts Luke's love of hip-hop with Squires' nostalgia for the sounds of his adolescence - Bowie, Donovan, Pink Floyd - to hint that one day Luke will be swept back to his youth by his own musical madeleines (like, OK I admit it, me), pricked by the realisation that he has never inhabited music with such fierce intensity since. The movie is often lit by the glow of late summer afternoons but it is also unmistakably tinged with the effulgence of hip-hop's golden age.
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