Never Die Alone

WHILE writing his memoir Bogart: In Search of My Father, Humphrey Bogart's son Stephen asked the late screenwriter George Axelrod to analyze the old man's screen persona. "Your father understood that the world was absurd," Axelrod told him. "That's something that nobody understood. He didn't really take life seriously. He knew it was all bullshit? Bogie understood that this existential quality is the kind of subtext that comes out in his performance, and that is why he is an immortal figure."

Don't be alarmed. I'm not quite ready to say that rapper-actor DMX, the star of Never Die Alone, is the new Bogart. He's still a bit rough around the edges, better at tough-guy posturing than nuanced expressions of emotion. And for a number of reasons (his music career, his youth, probably his race), his screen choices have not yet begun to suggest Bogart's range. But his straight-to-the-point minimalism is still appealing, and his character, King David-a drug dealer recalling his romantic and criminal escapades in a deathbed flashback-still put me in a Bogart frame of mind.

Like many of Bogart's detectives, mercenaries and killers, King David is a ruthless, intensely self-conscious loner who narrates his violent life story in purplish voice-over. DMX's antihero has Bogart's sense of mockery, mingled with self-mockery. He knows he's nearly always the smartest guy in the room, but he takes no pleasure in that knowledge. He is pleasantly surprised when potential customers at first seem uninterested in his wares and cynically amused when they turn out to be interested after all. He's not above giving a lover a little nose candy without revealing that it's heroin rather than cocaine. ("Guess there ain't a bitch alive that doesn't like a little coke now and again," he muses in voiceover.) He's a textbook illustration of I-don't-give-a-fuck criminal swagger, complete with slick duds, a stingingly misogynist attitude and a Carter-era Stutz Blackhawk.

If this character seems an offensive stereotype, then the man who created it has succeeded. King David sprang from the provocative imagination of Donald Goines, a Detroit native, prostitute's son, ex-soldier and junkie. He wrote Never Die Alone in the four-year period prior to his 1974 death-a fertile era that also produced his autobiographical Whoreson, Dopefiend, Black Girl Lost and Black Gangster. (Goines was, and still is, a huge influence on that subgenre of hiphop that tells criminal tall tales. The latter work even inspired a 1999 "soundtrack" that included a cut by DMX.) Drawing on the tradition of his idol, pimp-turned-author and cult icon Iceberg Slim, Goines' hoods, hookers, addicts and other fringe dwellers didn't merely embrace cultural stereotypes, they dragged them onto the dance floor. The deranged luridness of his fiction was an act of cultural assertiveness. In the 1940s, the insular complexity of bebop warned white jazz fans, "We're not your dance band anymore; we're more interested in talking to each other. But you can listen if you like." Goines' fiction took a similar tack, building a hard wall of "authenticity" between ghetto folklore and the world's anthropological fascination with it, then busting a hole in the wall and charging for the privilege of a peek.

Directed by Ernest Dickerson (Juice, Surviving the Game) and adapted by screenwriter James Gibson, Never Say Die is all about the privilege of peeking. It's an imperfect but intelligent and sometimes brilliant film, and it should not be mistaken for a gangsta fantasy. It's a movie about gangsta fantasy (a fine distinction) whose protagonist is not as grand a figure as he would have us believe. It's a postmodern noir, based on a noir-obsessed novel and directed by a noir-obsessed filmmaker-and like many great noirs, it's about a loser who wrongly believes himself a winner.

Dickerson and Gibson-and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, the loose, inventive wizard who shot Tigerland, Requiem for a Dream and Phone Booth-never miss an opportunity to hang a camera up high or jam it down super-low or tilt it when the urge strikes. But even when the movie revels in King David's badness, it provides narrative devices that subtly reprimand us for having fun. Like Goodfellas, A Clockwork Orange, Menace II Society and American Psycho-all of which were enclosed by narration that could be described as unreliable or severely limited-Never Die Alone explores a sadistic, self-centered sociopath who thinks himself a greater criminal mastermind than he really is. King David's smug, hateful narration-which echoes the cheeseball "hardness" of DMX's music-is revealed to be the product of the hero muttering into a handheld tape recorder as he drives around. This terrific gag-a twist on King David's first-person memoir excerpts in the novel-deflates the hero's swagger, complicates our response to him and kids the flamboyant narcissism of gangsta posturing in the bargain. The gap between King David's self-image and the reality of his situation should prompt viewers of all races and ethnic groups to ask themselves, "Why do you find guys like this so entertaining, and what does that interest reveal about your own life?" ^^^ This is a central question implicitly posed by all films about criminality, from Angels with Dirty Faces and Point Blank through Scarface and The Sopranos. The filmmakers ask it in a complex way, by preserving the unusual three-strand structure of Goines' novel. In addition to King David, Never Die Alone follows small-time hood Mike (Michael Ealy), a scarfaced young man who works for a drug dealer to whom King David owes money, and Paul Paskoff (David Arquette), a white Jewish writer fascinated by images of blackness. After Mike botches an attempt to kill King David, Paul finds him bleeding on the street and drives him to the ER in a vain attempt to save his life. King David is so moved by Paul's good Samaritan gesture that he changes his will on his deathbed and gives the stranger all of his belongings, including the car, the jewelry, his apartment and a nut of $250,000 cash.

Nosing around in the hero's apartment after his death, Paul finds cassette tapes of King David's florid narration and starts listening to them. The tapes recount King David's years trying to become a big-time Los Angeles drug dealer, a period that included an affair with a slutty white actress (Jennifer Sky) and a much more meaningful relationship with a black-Hispanic graduate student named Juanita (Reagan Gomez-Preston). "Even writing the word (love) makes me feel helpless, like I was weak," he narrates while Juanita blows him.

The sight of Paul driving around in King David's old car at night, vicariously experiencing the hero's thug misadventures via the magic of audiocassette, is one of the most potent illustrations I've ever seen of white America's fascination with ghetto dysfunction. Paul has posters of Miles Davis and Wu-Tang Clan on his wall, and a black girlfriend who chides him for wishing he could step into a gangsta rap video or a Quentin Tarantino film. If this guy could get together with Robert Downey Jr.'s character from Black and White, they'd have lots to talk about.

I hope viewers will pay close attention to how the words and images complement one another, then look past the surface and sense the film's depths-and its sly morality. This movie isn't as technically accomplished as Scarface, a movie it predictably name-checks. But morally, it's on much firmer ground. Unlike De Palma-or the Hughes Brothers, for that matter-Dickerson refuses to let himself be seduced by the glamour, sexism and ruthlessness exemplified by his scumbag hero. With its grainy, faded visuals, Never Die Alone feels less like a glamour-addled hiphop video than the work of a guerrilla filmmaker who is sincerely interested in the meaning of the images he shows us. The fierce yet controlled tone is somewhere between a 1940s Warner Bros. gangster picture-the kind that likely would have starred Bogart-and the work of writer-director Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor), an ex-newspaperman and World War II soldier who preferred honest thugs to dishonest intellectuals. Dickerson was pals with Fuller during his autumnal years. He once told me that he considers Fuller one of the finest American filmmakers and a profound influence on his directorial style, which prizes grit, invention, practical lights and spontaneity. With its mix of noir attitude, existential toughness and stray moments of vulnerability, it's the most Fuller-eque of all Dickerson's movies-a good film about a bad man.