Deep Focus: Top Five

Chris Rock finds his crackling identity as a moviemaker in his third film, Top Five, the way he found his incendiary personality as a standup in his 1996 HBO special, Feel the Pain. Whippet thin and volatile, Rock, in his breakthrough days, was dangerous but disarming. He gave his spindly body a forward tilt, matching the way he treated his gut feelings as the galaxy’s true center of wisdom. He pulled out the stops on his brusque, unsentimental view of life, discovering his stage legs by going out on a limb as a hip young truth-teller rather than an oblique yarn-spinner like Bill Cosby or a one-man carnival of characters like Richard Pryor. Multiple personalities didn’t spring out of him. But he expressed multiple varieties of irony and anger in his reedy, insistent voice. Having persevered through a difficult childhood and adolescence—he lived in Bed-Stuy, but attended white schools elsewhere, in a state of fear—he had the confidence to explode American concepts of race. His most famous routines tackled black-on-black prejudice. In his 1997 comedy book, Rock This!, Rock saw one race-charged situation this way: “A brother in his sixties hates everybody. He can’t stand white people. Why? Because old black men went through real racism. He didn’t go through that ‘I can’t get a cab’ shit. He was the cab. The white man would jump on his back and say: ‘Main Street!’ An old black man also hates young black people. To him, they’ve fucked up everything he’s worked for.”

In his new movie, Top Five, Rock brings off a fabulous new twist on that “‘I can’t get a cab’ shit,” deflating the idea that there’s been no racial progress in America. But he also takes a sharp satiric scalpel to the implicit racism that thrives in “progressive” parts of mainstream American culture. Top Five is the great leap forward for Rock’s filmmaking that Feel the Pain was for his standup. He creates an independent persona, “Andre Allen,” who is as smart, witty, and complicated as Rock himself, then crafts a scenario that allows Allen to earn our laughter—and even our romantic identification with his amorous longings. Among 2014 comedies, only The Trip to Italy can match it, and Top Five is visceral, topical, and funky. As Allen, Rock expresses his mordant rage at hipsters of any race who condescend to black artists, whether a radio producer who urges him to “bring the stank” to his reading of a promo or the showbiz honchos and fans who think the most he can aspire to is a buddy-movie franchise and the nouveau riche glitz of reality TV.

No Rock comedy has embraced African-American culture as fully as Top Five, yet it’s also his most universal film. Playing a stand-up comic who hit the Hollywood jackpot as a crime-fighter in a bear costume called “Hammy”—with the inevitable catchphrase, “It’s Hammy time”—Rock creates, in Allen, a portrait of a popular artist as an All-American burnout. Delayed adulthood is putting some crushing pressure on him. Acclaimed and beloved as a funnyman, Allen doesn’t want to make more comedies—he says he doesn’t feel funny. Everyone else views Uprize, his serious film about the Haitian Revolution of 1791, as a change of pace, but to Allen it’s the start of a new phase. And though he isn’t ready for marriage, he’s preparing for a wedding from media hell.

When Allen was on fire as a stand-up, he was high on alcohol or drugs, and now he’s sober. Even his right-hand man, played by J.B. Smoove (Curb Your Enthusiasm) with all his unctuous, rollicking Smoove-ness, thinks everyone is funnier when drunk (including, he says, Oprah). Top Five takes place on the day Uprize opens. Instead of celebrating his premiere, Allen frets about bad reviews and box office, agonizes over his impending televised nuptials to a Bravo lifestyle star named Erica (Gabrielle Union), relives his up-from-the-hood past for a persistent New York Times profile writer, Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), and, gradually, realizes what the audience knows early on: that he should be marrying her instead of Erica.

Nothing comes too easily to the characters in Top Five, but there’s nothing labored about the movie, either. As a writer, Rock sets up one volatile situation after another, no sweat, and as a director, he captures his performers at their most explosively spontaneous. (The exceptions, of course, are in the snippets from Uprize, depicting Allen and his co-stars looking as glum as Al Pacino and company did in Revolution.) When Rock, as a director, puts a collection of funny people into a single apartment, including Sherri Shepherd, Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Michael Che, and Jay Pharoah, the result is both absolutely real—the opposite of a Bravo show—and a verbal version of a Silly Symphony. Playing Allen’s oldest friends and loved ones, they yell out their picks for a list of Top Five rappers. The sequence is simple and terrific: Rock riffs with his co-stars in character, and earns the biggest laughs in a room full of scene stealers. Jones says Tupac Shakur might have evolved into “one of our political leaders.” Rock’s Allen thinks Tupac might have ended up as “the bad, dark-skinned boyfriend in a Tyler Perry movie.” Allen’s homeboys challenge him the way only time-tested friends can. When Allen selects LL Cool J as his sixth man, he defends himself for choosing the star of NCIS: Los Angeles by insisting he means LL Cool J “Before the show—before the show.”

Almost all the characters are full of surprises, including the pretty, shallow Erica; Allen credits her with forcing him to go sober. (The movie’s low point is Erica’s clunky speech acknowledging her own empty glamour.) Dawson’s reporter, Chelsea, hides a secret that’s brilliant as a comic device, but incredible as a reflection of journalistic reality. Yet even with its flaws, the screenplay is true to Rock’s art of upending expectations, not merely coining new expressions for home truths. Cedric the Entertainer is uproarious in the debunking role of a randy, sticky-fingered comedy promoter. He comes on as a streetwise genie, offering Allen anything he might desire, but he really uses his position to satisfy his own appetites. In the resulting Rabelaisian debauch, Rock displays a rare gift for raunch: as a writer-director, he recognizes when over-the-top is the right place to be; as a performer, he realizes the humor of getting small when Cedric goes big.

This hyperbolic set piece anchors Allen’s confession of his wayward alcoholic past; Chelsea, it turns out, is also an alcoholic, with some kinks in her life, too. Her disclosure of her boyfriend’s sexual preferences tops even Cedric’s bawdy excesses for erotic farce with a red-hot payoff. Amazingly, and touchingly, these scenes fit right into the growing intimacy between Chelsea and Allen. As frank as they are tender, as blind as they are smart, these grown-ups make beautiful romantic comedy together. Dawson and Rock match up perfectly in quickness and intelligence as well as carnal awareness. They truly convince you that two genuine, attractive people can indelibly bond in the course of a single day—these performers go beyond portraying sexual tension to achieve, at their best, a sensual relaxation. Cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro (Melancholia, Nymphomaniac) and editor Anne McCabe (Adventureland, Margaret) augment the characters’ ambling rapport with framing and cutting that help Rock maintain his focus on the actors’ unpredictable rhythms and reactions. A running-jumping-and-standing-still joke about the couple interacting with a gaggle of girls skipping rope is as full of charm, joy, and down-to-earth wonder as any routine by Chaplin—the man Allen calls “the KRS-One of comedy.” As the girls keep twirling their rope while Allen contemplates jumping in and Chelsea jubilantly joins them, it becomes a thrilling example of an inspired director locating huge laughs on and off the beats.

Rock has always had one eye on posterity. In Head of State (03), his first movie as a writer-director, he paid homage to Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He played a political innocent—a D.C. alderman—who is chosen as a presidential candidate by cynical party leaders but gains traction with voters when he asks: “How many of you work two jobs, just to have enough money to be broke?” Rock based his second movie, I Think I Love My Wife (07), on Eric Rohmer's delightfully airy Chloe in the Afternoon, hewing close to Rohmer's plot about a near-affair between a well-off family man and a bohemian gal who used to be his best friend's girlfriend. Despite its clever, fascinating sociology (upper-middle-class black parents try to be racially proud yet color-blind, spelling out rather than saying “white” and “black” in front of their children), one sizzling Viagra gag burned the rest of this wan film to a crisp.

Using classic models by Capra and Rohmer inhibited rather than unleashed the writer-director-star; these movies gave us bits and pieces of Chris Rock. Top Five boasts an impressive pedigree, too: its creative forebears include Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. But this film’s exploratory humor links it more directly to Rock’s engaged 2009 documentary, Good Hair (he produced and narrated; Jeff Stilson directed), which investigated the meaning and impact of female hairstyles within the African-American community and the tangled roots of white and black culture. In Top Five, Rock imbues a character more like himself with all his bristling sensibility—and creates a movie with its own candid, marvelous voice. As far as 2014 comedies go, it’s in my Top One.