And Denzel is having a good-ass time. Always the coolest guy in the room—rocking a diamond earring and waves, with the walls of his home office lined with images of stars of like Nas, Hendrix, Ali, and Jordan—with jokes for everyone and a hubristic streak that makes me think of his dishonest police chief in Carl Franklin’s heater Out of Time. “You got the chicken?” screams Rocky over the phone. Denzel fires back “How you want it? Baked, fried, or jerk?” dialogue only he could pull off. And, when Spike hits the streets of New York, he still captures the life of the city just as well as anyone. There’s a sequence on a packed 4 train the day of a Yankees–Red Sox game with some 25th Hour energy and a ridiculous Sergio Leone–style stand-off on a subway platform. In one moment, there’s a close-up on a still image of Yankees stud Aaron Judge that is basically erotic.

Those Spikeisms make Highest 2 Lowest watchable and occasionally fun, but, as the movie becomes more and more of a critique about hip-hop, it feels oddly toothless for Spike. We learn that Rocky’s kidnapper is a vulgar, attention-thirsty struggling Bronx drill–ish rapper named Yung Felon. He wanted all of his life to be discovered by David, a goal that has turned into an obsession. When Yung Felon’s identity is revealed, his music blows up with billions of streams, and new fans flock to support him despite his heinous crimes. He celebrates in a mildly surreal musical sequence that finds him rapping one of his hits in front of twerking BBL asses.

Sure, there’s some truth in Spike’s read of the current hip-hop landscape—the jail, or even death, to rap star pipeline is real; every week on Instagram there’s a new set of characters desperately chasing virality; and there are rappers being used to push right-wing propaganda—but his depiction of Yung Felon is lazy and not an absurd enough parody. If you’re going to skewer the genre, roast the fuck out of it! Call it a CIA psyop! Call it a community poison! Well, anything is better than Spike just parrotting the kind of “hip-hop today is all pussy-rap and gun-talk” messaging that every uncle rants about after seeing a couple of Say Cheese and Akademiks posts on his Instagram feed. What a bore!

In the 1980s and 1990s, when Spike’s complicated love of hip-hop pulsed through so many of his best movies, he used the genre as a way to humanize his characters, to reflect the angst of these young—often tragic—Black fuck-ups who had to fight police abuse, racism, and white fragility and exploitation just to survive. It was in the way Radio Raheem rolled around defiantly in Do the Right Thing with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blasting out of his boombox. It was in the way Mekhi Phifer posted up in the middle of the project yard in the opening scene of Clockers, soundtracked by the Premo-produced “Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers.” It was even in his militant and swaggy depiction of Malcolm X. He sympathized with the suffering of the characters in these movies and maybe even felt like if things went a little bit differently for him, he could have been them.