A Young Artist’s Journey, This Time on Film

When I first saw “Passing Strange” on Broadway a little more than a year ago, I admired it, but with some reservations. This musical story of adolescent rebellion and artistic self-discovery, written by Stew (with music by him and Heidi Rodewald) from the raw material of Stew’s own life, simmered with energy and ideas, with sonic and verbal wit, but it also strained for a soaring, transcendent theatricality that it could not quite achieve. The show’s rootedness in the swerves and bumps of an individual biography struck me as admirable but also limiting, and its themes of creative ambition, racial identity and the search for that elusive thing called the real seemed to lie too heavily on the surface.

But here’s the strange thing. When I saw Spike Lee’s film adaptation, “Passing Strange: The Movie,” in effect a video recording of a performance identical to the one I’d witnessed at the Belasco Theater in 2008, I was blown away. Loose ends ceased to dangle; soft spots were smoothed away and slow passages tightened up. Some of this may lie in my own preference for the cognitive solitude of movie-watching over the self-conscious sociability of theatergoing, but Mr. Lee’s contribution, as well as that of the cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, should not be discounted.

Their camera movements and compositions immerse the viewer at once in the story and the process of performance, emphasizing both the play’s artifice and its fidelity to emotional facts. The members of the small cast, several of whom take on multiple roles, are shown in the full, sweaty glory of self-transformation. (The band, present onstage and led by Ms. Rodewald, works pretty hard too.) And as Stew, a stout man in a red shirt and a dark suit, narrates and comments on the doings and dreamings of his younger, angrier, thinner and similarly dressed self (the excellent Daniel Breaker), changes of angle and focus illuminate the emotional distance between hotheaded youth and rueful middle age.

The child, as Wordsworth said, is father of the man. Or, as Stew puts it, “adulthood is the consequence of decisions made by a teenager.” And while there is a measure of sad wisdom in this observation, and in the raised brows and weary headshakes with which Stew now reflects on Stew then, “Passing Strange” celebrates the same foolish, heedless passion that it mocks and sometimes regrets. The show does two contradictory things at once, both brilliantly: it captures the impatient emergence of a budding artistic personality with a perfect mixture of sympathy and skepticism, and also reckons the sometimes devastating costs of a young artist’s desire to set himself free and make himself real.

The quest for the real — a term whose proliferating connotations in the musical seem derived, in equal measure, from postmodern literary theory and from hip-hop — begins in Los Angeles in the 1970s. There our teenage hero (identified as Youth), living with a doting, not-quite-understanding mother (Eisa Davis), seeks an outlet for his disaffection as well as an escape route from a black middle-class social environment that strikes him as sterile and phony. What he finds are drugs, punk rock and an array of cultural touchstones that are pressed into his hand by Mr. Franklin, a church choir director for whom Europe is a magical land of promise and fulfillment.

Mr. Franklin (one of several characters played by Colman Domingo, a tall actor with extraordinary cheekbones and even more extraordinary vocal and physical control) fills young Stew’s head with exotic names — Camus! Godard! — and images of African-American exile glamour. Visions of James Baldwin and Josephine Baker in Paris lead the hero to Amsterdam, but not before he has, like Prince Hal rejecting Falstaff, pushed Mr. Franklin away.

And this act of casual cruelty establishes a pattern. Again and again the young man’s insistence on finding a new horizon of the real — or the “more than real” — causes him to turn away from a person who has brought him closer to that goal. After Mr. Franklin, there are women in Amsterdam and Berlin (played by Rebecca Naomi Jones and de’Adre Aziza, both terrific in these and a handful of other roles). Looming over all these abandonments is the mother whose plaintive calls interrupt Stew’s European journey even as her checks underwrite it.

Strip the story down to its essentials and you can find the not especially exceptional tale of a spoiled, privileged kid wandering through foreign capitals dabbling in legal drugs, sexual exploration, radical politics and avant-garde art. That this highly unflattering interpretation lingers around the edges of “Passing Strange” is a tribute to the musical’s good-natured, unassuming honesty. And it is Stew’s refusal to sentimentalize his life that makes him a trustworthy guide to it. But at the same time, his refusal to condescend to the desire to wrest art from experience, or to the crystallizations of that desire in Los Angeles garages or Berlin cabarets, makes “Passing Strange” moving, thrilling and new.

That and the music, a pastiche of styles given coherence by the rumble of Stew’s voice and the snarl and wail of his electric guitar. “Passing Strange” is less a collection of songs — though there are a few, most notably “Keys (Marianna),” that stand out — than a single headlong piece of music. You might say a rock opera, if that phrase did not summon up spectacles of bloated self-importance entirely antithetical to the spirit of this show. A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.

PASSING STRANGE

The Movie

Opens on Friday in New York and is available on demand nationwide beginning August 26th.

Directed by Spike Lee; book and lyrics by Stew; director of photography, Matthew Libatique; originally staged by Annie Dorsen; edited by Barry Brown; music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald; produced by Steve Klein and Mr. Lee; released by Sundance Selects. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 2 hour 15 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Stew (Narrator), Daniel Breaker (Youth), de’Adre Aziza (Edwina/Marianna/Sudabey), Eisa Davis (Mother), Colman Domingo (Mr. Franklin/Joop/Mr. Venus), Chad Goodridge (Terry/Christophe/Hugo) and Rebecca Naomi Jones (Sherry/Renata/Desi).