A Huey P. Newton Story

A chain-smoking Huey P. Newton lights one cigarette after another, his mouth so dry that you can hear the sound of his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth. The film is one extended monologue of Huey's inner mind, concluding with an entrancing shadow boxing dance by Smith to Ballad of a Thin Man. Something really is happening, even if we don't know what it is. Identity and difference propel the "narrative," as per director Spike Lee's usual, given his desire to represent the real.

To be sure information is imparted about Huey as if he were still alive, with allusions to President George W. Bush. Looking back, he passes judgment on Eric Clapton's '80s cover of Bob Marley's hit I Shot the Sheriff but today likes rap, and loves Vincent Price. With his thigh-shaking, cigarette-puffing manner, Smith cultivates Dr. Huey P. Newton who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Black Panthers at UC Santa Cruz and was killed in 1989. It's helmed by the first filmmaker that would come to anyone's mind to direct this material, Lee, the relentlessly socially conscious filmmaker known for tackling issues of Black American identity and racial politics as well as autobiographical themes. But in the grouping of New Territories, the film's well-placed in terms of subject but as a film it's a filmed staged production and fails to be ground-breaking.

Were we fearful of having our bourgeois advantages taken away? Was it unfounded fear? Were they gun-toting terrorists or just one of several collective, anti-capitalist, anti-racist movements? Or was the left-wing politics simply window dressing for a colossal, radical trend-propelled deception? Well, you won't hit upon resolutions to many of these questions in this TV adaptation of Smith's one-man show, but you will get an impressive illustration of a man every trace as complicated and multifaceted as the movement he co-established. As depicted by Smith, Newton is at first withdrawn and tenderly soft-spoken. But as he loosens up, the words come out in a hurried, capriciously connected deluge. Newton seems incapable of standing from his chair, but he's like a restless child and can hardly stay seated. Assured in his cleverness and with a flair for poetry, he's inclined to overstatement and blatant BS, using to excess and squandering terms like "existentialism," trying to make an impression, sweet-talk or alarm his audience into worshipping him, then slipping into bizarre, droll asides on race, politics, philosophy, Shakespeare, mythology and music.

Researchers have found that TV programs that feature black characters can influence both how young black viewers see themselves and how others view them. And Huey's clever, time and again rather uncanny, and undoubtedly distressed. He's somewhere between the most profoundly sharp underachiever you've ever met and that guy talking to himself at the bus stop. Smith gives an extremely impressive, tremendously physical performance entailing the severest, most persistent cigarette smoking I've ever seen.

Regardless, Spike Lee uses whatever tools he can to make this more than a plain transcript of a stage play, including blue screen effects and documentary footage. The prison-like set further underscores the acute remoteness of Huey Newton, who spent years in solitary confinement. In contrast, Lee's tendency for extreme close-ups that cut off parts of his subject's face and body merely functions to dissociates us from this enigmatic character. In the end, I'm not sure I know where the stage ends and the real Newton begins. But maybe that's the point.

Huey P. Newton may not be as well known to people from 'my' generation- meaning those who grew up in the majority of time after his death (1989). He was one of the co-founders of the Black Panter party. According to Wikipedia, he became the head of the 'Ministry of Defense' by a coin toss with Bobby Seale, and then there were some ups and downs... mostly downs, and a lot of them (though not all) brought on by 'The Man' and screwing with him and sending him to prison for a murder he didn't commit, and then spent the 70's in the wake of the Blank Panther party to do... well, to try and figure out what kind of responsibility he had as a "leader", a term that, if one believes this live performance/mixed media film, he wasn't very comfortable with, certainly not as a Socialist.

Since my knowledge of him going into it was not very wide-reaching, I had to judge the work by its own terms, as theatrical presentation all-around. It's a theater piece that, like other times Spike Lee has done, is caught on film with vivid colors and light and a camera that is either constantly on the move or in an angle that seems to be too unusual to be filmed all live, plus edited-in newsreel footage either cut in or screened behind the actor.

I have to wonder if this was filmed like like other productions like Freak or Original Kings of Comedy. It might make sense that he stopped the performance to get another angle, or that, because it's being taped, Roger Gueneveur Smith would have stopped for the director. Or it's all just really planned out and to-the-T timing on Lee's part. There's not a fault on his part I could find.

As for Smith, his performance is something different. I was always feeling on edge with how he did Huey Newton, and it was a strange edge. I have to take it on the basis of the performance, which is at the least convincing of being full of passion and paranoia, that this was how Newton was. Smith makes Newton into an equally charismatic and scary figure, one whose eyes have that cold-dark stare like someone at war (or, more approximately, a revolutionary who sometimes scares himself "like an onion, crying at the present" he says). Sometimes this did work for me, and his rapport with the audience, whether they were for real or planned by Lee, had a good genuine up-beat quality transforming it a little past a usual theater-monologue into a shared theater work.

Other times... I don't want to say Smith is not talented, because it's completely clear he is. But it's such a FAST performance, with words flying faster than an Aaron Sorkin script on uppers, that it's hard to keep up, and with an accent out of one of the side characters from JFK or something: real New Orleans creole sound. Again, this isn't to denigrate the performance, but a few moments I just heard my head screaming "Just QUIET for one second!" And yet just as I would think that, the performance would slow down, and something wonderful would occur.

Huey talks about the savage nature of a circus geek and how a geek has to be cunning and quick with the chicken and toss out just one bone to remind everyone else looking in they are the geeks; an analogy for black repression in America. It's a chilling passage, but even better is what comes after as he gets up and does a groovin' dance to Bob Dylan's "Balad of a Thin Man" (some of it, not all of it), cigarette flying.

The mood is tense and taut, but the material Smith delivers, with the kind of intensity of a professional who never loses for an instant his own conviction and stamina for the real person and the themes, is absorbing. You want to know more about him after it ends, as it feels oddly enough as though this just scratches the surface about the movement and history. At the least there is a sense of this man, who had a biting, sardonic sense of humor, bitter at those around him and somewhat at himself, and just at a society that doesn't see how its in revolution always.

It's a radical little production and direction for a radical who was as vulnerable as he was vicious and, indeed, kind of crazy, and its only liability is some repetitiveness in its performance and (by nature of its location) some of the shots. And it gives some great references to Macbeth ("ghetto gangster, Act V Scene V) and Black Orpheus as a bonus.

Roger Guenveur Smith deserves high praise for his uncanny resemblance to and phenomenal rendition of Huey P. Newton bringing to life a formidable figure in American history. It is mesmerizing to watch the complexity and brilliance of Newton being played out on screen.

I have never seen a performance of such rich intensity in a one man show. The actor became Huey P Newton, brought back to life, became him, alive and living as him now, not as a history of him, but actually is him. You are challenged by him, and in his interaction with the audience, you see people being moved, no shocked out of their lethargy, and back to the essence of the dream that the black power movement represented. The black power movement that I was never allowed to see. Through the filtered media, in which we are spoon fed half a dozen stories a day that fit some kind of prescription for complacency and helpless outrage designed to keep us watching but doing nothing, Huey sucked on a Kool, chain smoking them as he spits out bullets of truth like tears and laughter. You feel the tragedy of his loss, which is our loss. And its an outrage that I never got to know him. He talks about the fact that the FBI felt that it wasn't the guns that were the main problem with the black panther party, but when they started to feed the poor, that was when they were really considered to be really dangerous. That had to be stopped. this show contains a thousand of these stories, that tickle and lacerate you, they revise your history. he slaps you in your face and you are so grateful to be awake and alive. when he cries you cry for him, for you and for everyone that missed out on what was trying to be accomplished. Martin Luther King wasn't the whole story of the civil rights movement. If it were, then how come his death was followed by the mass incarceration of black people in this country, and the crack epidemic, and the implosion of the inner city and its schools. Whoever shot Huey , it wasn't a drug dealer, no you know who it was. You know. The waited, they bided their time and they took him out. WE took him out because he was right, and when he became right and true it became intolerable. In our society, the truth needs to be destroyed because the truth ushers in change, and when change comes in, and the lights go on, the people making billions and trillions off of the misery of others will do anything to prevent that change from happening. Thats why we are looking to burn oil at the moment we understand global warming. Thats why we are pretending to create democracy in Iraq. We wont tackle the real issue of finding alternative energy. We don't have the courage to create full employment and the result is that we have given our destiny over to countries like china who makes deals to provide slave labor to transnational corporation's like walmart so that we lose all our jobs in exchange for cheaper and cheaper good. Our lives are disintegrating, and our politicians are as morally bankrupt as they are expert in manipulating our fears. We have replaced our factories with prisons. Higher efficiency means cheaper goods but meaningless service jobs at MacDonald's. We are in a state of perpetual undeclared war so that there is a rationale for watching everyone. We are turning, imperceptibly, into what the soviet union was. We live in gated communities that are not unlike versions of feudalistic states back in the middle ages. soon walled cities will be back with us. 40 million people have no insurance while doctors make half a million dollars a year. hospitals are going broke but they pay their executives half a million dollars a year. we spend 63 billion dollars to fix up new Orleans but the people are still living in the dark while halliburton fixes pipes, not people. the black homeless people from that disaster cant get jobs rebuilding their city because the clean up companies will only hire illegal aliens who are dirt cheap. Huey P Newton is not dead. He lives on. He lives on every time we get outraged at what is happening here in America. Wake up, the walls are crumbling around you. Huey! Huey!We are Huey! Remember what the old African said. You is We.

I've seen Smith in a bunch of movies usually in a small yet important role and on HBO's K Street. This rendering of his live play by Lee finally showcases his tremendous range. Smith is one of those enigmatic actors you see but can't quite place -- here he stands out magically: an enigma playing an enigma. Intense!

I liked the music, it was subtle, supportive and gave great context. Seeing the berets of the audience members reminds us the icon Newton has been. It seemed to be, to a certain extent, a memorial. The use of the archival footage was effective as was Smith's choreography.

As a writer, Smith incorporated many threads of Newton's life skillfully. One thing I didn't get from the film was a cardboard cutout of Newton in one way or the other. He was neither the oversimplified "angry black man" nor the "crazed junkie." Smith's rendering of the character had so much texture: he was vulnerable, strong, defiant, needy, angry, compulsive, confident, worldly and naive. Beautifully written, expertly done. Why Smith isn't playing more leads is a real mystery. I hope he does more work like this.