Commentary : Hip-Hop Goes ‘Deep’ : Genre gives director Michael Rymer the medium he needs to tell story of street crime.

One of the oddest and most recent examples of the maturation and assimilation of hip-hop as an aesthetic medium comes from a film that is not quite hip-hop, yet appropriates and takes seriously its imagery and conventions as a means for creating cinematic art. “In Too Deep” is a very conventional crime drama about the world of the undercover cop that has been transformed into an unsettling hip-hop anomaly by Australian director Michael Rymer and two standout performances by its stars, actor Omar Epps and rapper LL Cool J.

Rymer, who has only two previous films to his credit, had scarcely noticed hip-hop before undertaking this film. “The language and ad-lib dialogue and a lot of the values expressed by the characters describe a world that I knew nothing about--I have no idea why they chose me,” Rymer said, concerning his selection to make the film by writer-producers Michael Henry Brown and Paul Aaron. “They wanted to do an undercover police drama, and yet, they hired an Australian who had really only made a tragic love story.”

Rymer, a graduate of the USC School of Cinema-Television, is referring to his first film, “Angel Baby” (1995), a work of exquisite tenderness and woe, and a winner of seven awards at Australia’s version of the Oscars. It is a film, like this one, in which the actors seem framed and enlarged by the veracity of Rymer’s intimate approach. In short, he is an actor’s director.

“In Too Deep” does not seem to rise to the level of “Angel Baby.” But, somehow, there is something, a nagging indefinable quality that marks it as noteworthy, perhaps even memorable, if for nothing more than to experience Rymer’s clipped, expressionistic depictions of mythic opposites, or to admire the work of his two young stars, in the guise of dueling ambiguities, which meet at the heart of the drama.

Writer-producer Aaron tinkered with the tried-and-true conventions of the crime drama, but his objective was homage, rather than revolution.

“I didn’t want to break the mold, but to in some way imprint it with a slightly different design,” Aaron said. For this reason, Aaron won’t even admit that his undercover cop story is even about crime, so much as about identity and war.

“To me it is much more a story about war. And the fact that . . . many cops ‘left in too long’ undergo a kind of pressure and tension that destroys a human being, no matter how strong, destroys many men’s ability to hang on to a reality that is livable. And I wanted to do a story in which one could see that for many cops, especially undercover, there is a war on the streets in this country.”

Rymer’s visual approach to the material of “In Too Deep” seems to treat it as a little film, a potboiler even, baldly composed of a hodgepodge of American movie cliches and icons, which then straightaway dives into the things boiling inside the pot, a swirling world of hot and uncomfortable ideas.

If one swallows the slightest bit, one is obliged to acknowledge the enveloping presence of a stylized, claustrophobic labyrinth whose dead-ends and gateways require they be viewed with a kind of mythic seriousness, like the kind reserved for Dashiell Hammett novels, or better, the urban noir of Chester Himes or the films of Sidney Lumet.

Rymer credits cinematographer Ellery Ryan, production designer Dan Leigh, editor Dany Cooper and sound designer Tom Mather for evoking the gritty, hip-hop landscapes and arrhythmic beats of Cincinnati’s crime underworld. They depict a world where the sun is out, but smeared flat like a paste and spread across a metallic gray sky.

And when the boats chug out into the harbor or plow along the bay loaded with commuters and lovers and families, even the surging waterway seems closed, flat and as unforgiving as steel. When two tough guys sit picnicking and conspiring in a park sipping beers from brown paper bags while the baby boy on the ground nearby squalls until he’s picked up by his doting dad, the whole scene is closed, drab, despite the easy banter of the men.

Accordingly, many of its external elements have a reflective sheen or a murky ambiguity that gleefully invokes the garish, inner-city labyrinths it explores. Intersecting ironies of identity and reality comprise its best running gags and its most serious moral theme.

Our driven hero encounters a world where “God” (Cool J) is a charitable killer thug and where each character is an amalgam of good and evil.

Co-Star LL Cool J ‘Completely Owns’ Role

Epps and Cool J were among the first choices Aaron and Brown made. “Michael [Henry Brown] and I worked on this for four years before Miramax picked it up. Omar was the first actor we talked to because I have felt since ‘Juice’ that Omar was going to be one of the major young actors of our time.”

Rymer was skeptical at first about the choice of Cool J as the drug lord, God, whose witty and demonic presence looms over much of the film. “We were all a little nervous about casting LL in such a performance-driven role. LL, up until this film, had an extremely big brother-like image. Could he even persuade someone he is a dangerous man? And now, when you look at the film, you can’t imagine anyone else doing it. He completely owns that role.” The film co-stars Stanley Tucci, Nia Long and Pam Grier, and a strong supporting cast.

Cool J is aware of what many veteran actors think of rap stars. “A lot of actors feel like rap musicians and rappers take roles from them and what have you, but at the end of the day you have to ask: Would you have portrayed the character better than the way the guy or girl did it? I think I brought a human quality to a guy who is a complete villain.”

Epps’ aura of danger and brooding good looks serve him well here. He sees his role as the adrenaline-addicted cop Jeff Cole as the most challenging of his career.

“When I read the script, everything about it, the duality, the levels that were offered to me were synonymous to Pacino in ‘Serpico’ for this generation, in terms of what it offered to a young actor in my age range.” The four-year delay from when Aaron and Brown first approached him to the start-up of production, Epps now sees as fortuitous.

“In hindsight, I don’t think I had lived enough life at that point to do all I tried to do at this time,” Epps recalled. “Actors get greater as they get older, as do writers. Because they live more life, they can emote more.”

Both Epps and Rymer refer to Lumet as an important model for the making of this film. “In the outward texture of the film, I was trying to work in the tradition of Sidney Lumet,” Rymer said. “I wanted to try to get something that felt very authentic, like ‘Serpico’ rather than a cartoon version of a crime story.”

Hip-Hop as a Deconstructing Element

Hip-hop, it turns out, is the perfect medium for expressing all this, since its art relies on negation, deconstruction, voluptuousness and shock as essential elements of identity. In this way, the aesthetics of hip-hop have much in common with a Frank Gehry dwelling and with the assemblage/paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, both of which appear to employ similar aesthetic strategies.

Rymer describes his approach to hip-hop in this way: “I realized what hip-hop was doing in relation to ordinary pop music and rock ‘n’ roll. It is completely deconstructing. It seems to me that rap starts by stripping away a lot of melody that you find in rock and pop music.”

This technique of stripping out and deconstruction allowed Rymer to approach the material in a new way, almost as assemblage rather than film.

“You start with the idea of appropriation, which is what most of modern art seems to have become about, both avant-garde and commercially,” Rymer explained. “And hip-hop is the embodiment of that.” Rymer said that hip-hop takes for granted that “we’ve sort of used up all of the original ideas, and now everything is about finding ways to appropriate existing things to make them our own again.”

Aaron sees the utility of hip-hop in similar terms. “Hip-hop is an extraordinary amalgam of many things that came before. It is demanding, it is improvisational, it is real, and it is a kind of forced truth of the moment which mutates before our very eyes, in its fashion, in its rhythm, in its statement, in its anger, and it’s such a constant reflection that it is, I think, a major cultural force.”

By deconstructing the crime story and exposing the bare bones and the naked identities underneath, “In Too Deep” arrives at a crude, but exhilarating X-ray reconstruction of the cops-and-killers genre, with most of the old hard-boiled ideas faithfully intact and transcribed, but writ new, in the illuminated and raw vernacular of hip-hop.

Emory Holmes is an occasional contributor to Calendar.