Hip-hop culture has saturated almost every corner of America, and if it weren’t for the wide open plains setting, the occasional bison wandering into the frame, and the slight trace of Oglala Lakota accents, you’d swear you were watching a tale of poverty and desperation straight out of any of America’s bleakest inner-city ghettos, replete with corn-row hairstyles.
Rap is everywhere, as are AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) speech patterns which is why it’s reminiscent of “Out of the Furnace,' where exclusive, isolated Mountain-people enclaves, formerly known for their moonshine distilleries, are shown to be overrun with sideways-worn baseball caps, tats galore, rap blasting out of muscle cars, and AAVE.
On the Rez
On the Pine Ridge reservation, it’s nonstop hustling to escape poverty: 23-year-old, two-time baby-daddy Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) tries to sell ripped-off PlayStations, and siphons gas out of cars at the local gas station while the owners are inside getting a cup of coffee. He’s got two kids by two different moms: One’s in jail for a bail violation, and the other, a beauty, won’t take his calls and calls him a loser.
Bill juggles jobs, the first working for a sleazy local turkey farmer who cheats on his wife with underage local Native girls, whom Bill is often tasked with driving home. Then, when he returns a lost grey poodle he finds in his yard to its owner, he lands his latest get-rich-quick hustle: If he can come up with $1,000, he can keep the dog, breed it, and then sell the pups for profit. Bill’s pipe-dreams are immediately prodigious.
Overall
There’s a bleak beauty to the landscape, often shot in the pink-hued, magic-hour glow of dusk, and the regular-folks/non-professional cast, handpicked from the Lakota community, is grounded, persuasive, and raw. The scene where Matho’s dad chokes his son unconscious is vivid enough to garner young LaDainian Crazy Thunder an immediate contract signing with an agent.
I found the revelation that the whole world’s rapidly becoming a hip-hop ghetto depressing as all get-out. And yet there’s something magical and riveting in non-actors living their roles because they have no need to do actor homework like character research. Quality storytelling can make just about any topic interesting.
And despite the bleakness, it’s strangely fascinating that, via Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village, as much as the human races are different and varied, we all end up migrating culturally in the same direction regardless. And so the underlying message is, perhaps someday, we’ll all be on the same page. It’s looking to be a hip-hop page for now, but when it comes to humans, the only thing that remains the same, is change. So there’s hope.
