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      ‘The League’ Review: A Crucial Baseball Legacy

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      Sam Pollard’s new documentary traces the history of the Negro leagues.If you thought that Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in professional baseball, “The League” would like to offer a correction. Moses Fleetwood Walker became a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884, before organized baseball was segregated and more than 60 years before Robinson broke the major leagues’ color line.This documentary from Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) traces the history of the Negro leagues that formed in the intervening years. And while the sport’s post-World War II integration was long overdue — one commentator cites the absurdity of Black and white men fighting together at Guadalcanal but being banned from competing on a diamond — “The League” notes that, as the majors grabbed star players without buying out their contracts, the Negro leagues and the economic communities built around them never received adequate compensation.Pollard presents the subject matter straightforwardly, occasionally dryly, with authors, historians and — in archival material — the players themselves sharing stories of team rivalries and of visionary owners. Among the (sometimes tragic) figures singled out are Rube Foster, credited here with increasing the tempo of the game and persuading other team owners to form a league; Josh Gibson, who still has one of the best season batting averages ever recorded; and Effa Manley, an owner of the Newark Eagles, a team raided for talent after the color barrier fell. The film even complicates the picture on some baseball legends. Larry Lester, a founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, notes that when Babe Ruth set the home run record — later broken by Hank Aaron — he did it at a time when racism had kept out many of the best pitchers.This history has surely been well-covered elsewhere, but “The League” recounts it movingly.The LeagueRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

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      A new edit of ‘The French Connection’ removes a racial slur. But nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture.The remarkable thing about the censored scene is how ordinary it feels if you’ve watched a police procedural made before, say, 2010. It’s in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” from 1971. Two narcotics cops — Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, and Buddy (Cloudy) Russo, played by Roy Scheider — are at the precinct, following an undercover operation during which a drug dealer ended up slashing Russo with a knife. The injury has left Russo struggling to put on his coat. “Need a little help there?” Doyle chuckles, then adds an ethnic jab: “You dumb guinea.” Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?” Here Doyle points a slur at the Black dealer: “Never trust a nigger.” Russo: “He could have been white.” Doyle: “Never trust anyone.” Then he invites Russo out for a drink, and they trade masturbation jokes as they head through the door.But perhaps you should forget I mentioned any of this, because you’re now a lot less likely to see it in the film. In June, viewers of the Criterion Channel’s streaming version noticed that much of the scene had been edited out, without announcement or comment; people viewing via Apple TV and Amazon found the same. It was reported that the version available on Disney+ in Britain and Canada remains unedited, suggesting that whoever authorized the cut imagined the moment to be unfit for American audiences in particular. (Disney owns the rights to the film, having acquired Fox, its original distributor, in 2019.) The domestic market now sees a slapdash sequence that has Russo entering the room, clutching his forearm, followed by a jerky jump to the door, where Doyle waits. The disparaging exchange is, of course, omitted. What remains is a glitch, a bit of hesitation, the suggestion of something amiss. “Never trust anyone,” indeed.Bad jump cuts create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play.The conversation that has surrounded this edit — a belated alteration to the winner of an Academy Award for best picture — is just the latest of many such controversies. In 2011, one publisher prepared an edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that replaced instances of that same racial slur with “slave.” In February, Roald Dahl’s British publisher, Puffin Books, and the Roald Dahl Story Company confirmed that new editions of the author’s works, published in 2022, had been tweaked to substitute language that might offend contemporary readers, including descriptors like “fat” and “ugly.” (After a backlash, Puffin said it would keep the original versions for sale, too.) Then, of course, there are the right-wing campaigns to excise passages from instructional texts or simply remove books from public schools and libraries.This particular change to “The French Connection” came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. “The French Connection” was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the “inner city,” dialogue underlining their “good cop, bad cop” dynamic; in certain ways, it’s not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyle’s eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running “alcoholic cop” trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing — another ongoing genre cliché. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, “rough around the edges” — but, of course, we’re ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like “The Shield” and “The Wire”: figures built on the idea that “good cop, bad cop” can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.Attempting to edit out just one of a character’s flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldn’t be using racial epithets. But they’re probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too — like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a film’s legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isn’t to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinema’s great avatar of paranoia — a star in three of this country’s most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, “The French Connection,” “The Conversation” and “Enemy of the State” — then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that. This is a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor.Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; they’re disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into “The French Connection” reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if it’s unclear from which direction it’s reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning — and living — in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained. You can, of course, find the unedited precinct scene on YouTube. (Just as you can find altered scenes from other films, from “Fantasia” to “Star Wars.”) It’s just packaged inside an interview with Hackman about his approach to portraying Doyle, whom he disliked. “The character was a bigot and antisemitic and whatever else you want to call him,” the actor says. “That’s who he was. It was difficult for me to say the N-word; I protested somewhat, but there was a part of me that also said, ‘That’s who the guy is.’ I mean, you like him or not, that’s who he was. You couldn’t really whitewash him.” Turns out you can.Opening illustration: Source photographs from 20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesNiela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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      in Theater

      Philip Schuyler Is Knocked Off His Pedestal in Albany

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      A statue of the Revolutionary War general, newly prominent thanks to the musical “Hamilton,” has been removed from its place outside Albany City Hall because he enslaved people.There was a time when one probably had to be a committed Revolutionary War buff or an aficionado of early Albany aristocracy to know the name Philip J. Schuyler.But that was before “Hamilton.”Indeed, as any devotee of the blockbuster musical can tell you, the Schuylers were Colonial-era movers and shakers, and the central figures in the show’s fraught love triangle between Hamilton and two of the Schuyler sisters.And while Philip Schuyler never speaks during the show, he is a presence even before he becomes Hamilton’s father-in-law: “Take Philip Schuyler, the man is loaded,” Aaron Burr intones, and Schuyler is mentioned frequently by his daughters, Angelica, Eliza and Peggy.In reality, Schuyler was much more prominent than a bit part: the patriarch of a wealthy Albany family — a patroon, as Dutch-era landowners were known — he served as a New York lawmaker, a United States senator, and a major general in the war with the British, and was a close friend of George Washington.Those accomplishments had resulted in a seven-foot-tall statue of Schuyler being placed, nearly a century ago, on a pedestal in front of Albany’s grandly Romanesque City Hall, just across from the State Capitol. In recent years it sometimes drew “Hamilton” fans to snap selfies.The Schuyler statue — in bronze, by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-born sculptor — had stood outside City Hall since 1925. iStock/Getty ImagesBut Schuyler also enslaved people, by some accounts among the most in the Albany area at the time. That fact has led to a reconsideration of his legacy, and ultimately to his statue’s removal — a slow-motion retreat on a flatbed trailer — after years of delays and amid a backlash by some who argue that such actions do little to remedy past sins and may even miss an opportunity for education.The removal is part of a wider reckoning with the racist actions of historical figures, a movement that gained steam during the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer in Minneapolis. That re-evaluation has included the removal or dismantling of scores of monuments devoted to Confederate figures, and has even touched on Hamilton himself, who some scholars say is likely to have enslaved people despite his reputation as an abolitionist.In Schuyler’s case, the statue’s detachment — from a pedestal hiding a 1920s time capsule, complete with a letter from a Schuyler descendant — was authorized by Albany’s mayor, Kathy Sheehan, via executive order in June 2020.In an interview, Ms. Sheehan said that her decision had come, in part, after concerns were raised by Black members of her staff. “You couldn’t get into City Hall without walking past the statue,” said Sheehan, a Democrat, who said budget problems and the pandemic had stymied earlier efforts to move the statue.Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany held a news conference after a time capsule was discovered in the base of the statue.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesMs. Sheehan noted that Schuyler’s slaveholding was well-known. Nearly two decades ago, the remains of enslaved people were discovered buried on property once owned by the Schuyler family.Alice Green, the executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, a civil rights organization in Albany, said that the statue’s removal was “a relief.”“It didn’t seem right that we should have a statue on public property, glorifying and paying tribute to someone who had done what he did to African American people,” said Dr. Green, adding that her group had worked for years to have Schuyler sent packing, and that the publicity around “Hamilton” may have given the effort momentum.“Some people, I think, became more angry after learning more about who Schuyler was,” Dr. Green said. “And they only were able to do that because people started talking about Schuyler as a result of ‘Hamilton.’”The removal was met with opposition from some prominent local lawmakers: Representative Elise Stefanik, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House majority, who represents a district in Northern New York, accused Ms. Sheehan of trying to “erase history” with the statue’s removal.Jeff Perlee, a Republican member of the Albany County Legislature, echoed that.“I just think it reflects poorly on Albany, and its awareness of its own history,” said Mr. Perlee, adding that — unlike Confederate figures — Schuyler was “someone who sacrificed everything he had to create this country.”“Can you imagine Boston turning its back on Sam Adams or Virginia denying Thomas Jefferson?” Mr. Perlee continued. “The leaders in those places, I think, are sophisticated enough to understand the historical context and the whole measure of attributes and negative features of historical figures. And unfortunately, the leaders in Albany don’t.”Workers with the time capsule, and its contents, found in the base of the statue.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThere is no question that Schuyler — and Hamilton — had a major presence in Albany. Hamilton, who famously died in a duel with Burr, his political rival, in 1804, was married to Eliza Schuyler at the family’s mansion on Albany’s south side in 1780, where Hamilton also worked on the U.S. Constitution, according to “Oh Albany!,” a history of the city by William Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Both Hamilton and Burr also had law practices in the capital, not far from City Hall.The Schuyler Mansion, overlooking the Hudson River, was a seat of power in old Albany, an impressive estate with formal gardens and a working farm manned by dozens of enslaved people and other servants, according to the state’s parks department. Mr. Kennedy said that Schuyler — who married Catherine Van Rensselaer, from another prominent Dutch family — was host to some of America’s most famous figures at its most formative moments.“He was constantly talking with people like Benjamin Franklin when they were planning the Declaration of Independence,” said Kennedy, who is 95 and the éminence grise of Albany’s literary scene. “And his house was a place of common traffic with the leadership of this nation.”The Schuyler statue — in bronze, by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-born sculptor — was a gift of George C. Hawley, a local beer baron, and treated as front-page news in the Knickerbocker Press, which recounted a parade and thousands of onlookers at its unveiling, including military units and Boy Scouts, in June 1925.“The attention of millions of persons from all parts of the world will be arrested by General Schuyler’s figure, eloquent reminder of duties of manhood and obligations of citizenship,” the Press quoted Charles H. Johnson, the keynote speaker, as saying.Mr. Johnson’s prediction may have been hyperbolic, but the smash success of “Hamilton” — which opened at the Public Theater in 2015 and transferred to Broadway — has had a spillover effect to related Albany attractions. Attendance at the Schuyler mansion — now a state historic site — doubled between 2015 to 2019, as officials there and others began offering special Alexander Hamilton tours at the mansion and around Albany.The Schuyler sisters have also had their close-up, with specialized tours at the mansion, and a 2019 exhibition at the Albany Institute of History and Art.The Schuyler sisters: Phillipa Soo as Eliza, Renee Elise Goldsberry as Angelica and Jasmine Cephas Jones as Peggy in “Hamilton” on Broadway in 2015.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, however, historians here do not try to whitewash Schuyler’s personal connection with slaveholding, including at the mansion, said Heidi L. Hill, the site’s manager. The mansion’s exhibits highlight the stories of an enslaved butler and valet of Philip Schuyler, as well the story of an enslaved woman who fled the mansion. The mansion also was the publisher of a 2020 paper linking Hamilton to slavery.Schuyler died in 1804, just months after Hamilton was killed in the duel. Schuyler’s fame ebbed, but his name has continued to be affixed to villages, schools and bakeries around the Albany area (though some of those have also decided to change their names).“He’s one of those figures that’s like hugely significant in his own lifetime, but he doesn’t have quite as prominent a role post-Revolution,” said Maeve Kane, an associate professor of history at the University at Albany. “So he has this role during the Revolution and then he kind of fades away.”Dr. Kane added that while the musical hadn’t necessarily changed the perception of Philip Schuyler, it had “acted as a catalyst for these broader conversations about early America.”“And as a historian, I think that’s valuable,” Dr. Kane said.As for the sculpture itself, the bronze was taken to an undisclosed location as the city considers where it put it; a 2022 study, “What to Do With Phil?,” authored by a local youth group — the Young Abolitionist Leadership Institute — considered several options, including moving the statue to a location near the Capitol.In the meantime, Mayor Sheehan says that she hopes that a new city commission — likely to be approved by Albany’s Common Council this summer — will find a good spot where the fullness of Schuyler’s life can be told, saying the removal is “not about scrubbing” the past.“It’s not about cancel culture and not about canceling him, but about moving him to a place where the entire story is contextualized,” she said, adding, “You cannot contextualize the history of anyone on a traffic circle.” More

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      in Television

      The Outsize Genius of ‘I’m a Virgo’

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      The giant teenager in Boots Riley’s new Amazon Prime series is among television’s boldest moves in a while.Brobdingnag is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. On the map included in Volume II of his 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift depicts it as an enormous peninsula somewhere north of California. Brobdingnag is the land of the giants: When Gulliver is shipwrecked there, he finds a race of people nearly 60 feet tall, wise and moral, repulsed by his descriptions of a venal and warlike British society. The West Coast no longer teems with such gentle giants, but according to the writer, director and musician Boots Riley, there remains one well south of Brobdingnag, near the spot Swift designates P. Monterey — there’s a giant living in Oakland, Calif.Riley’s new Amazon Prime series, “I’m a Virgo,” is a Swiftian fable by way of Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Alan Moore and Spike Lee. It is, centrally, the tale of Cootie, a once-in-a-generation giant who becomes both a folk hero and a public enemy. As someone tells him in an early episode, “People are always afraid, and you’re a 13-foot-tall Black man.” Cootie’s adoptive parents keep him as sheltered as they can; he grows up watching the action on his block via a periscope. He’s a learned giant — his father requires him to read 10 hours a day — but he’s also electrified by screens, parroting lines from his favorite reality-TV shows. (His mantra — “from that day forward, I knew nothing would stop me from achieving greatness” — is a quote from a “Bachelorette”-style program.) His parents, trying to persuade him to stay in the safety of the two-story apartment they’ve built, show him a scrapbook of giants throughout history, many Black, enslaved or lynched for their gigantism; he will, they clearly fear, be a too-visible man, a projection screen for the fears and desires of others. (This is not a fate reserved for giants alone.) But when Cootie finally leaves the house as a teenager, he falls in love with this world, in all its sublimity and stupidity. Hearing bass for the first time, thumping from a new friend’s trunk, he becomes an angry poet: “It moves through your body like waves,” he tells his parents. “And it sings to your bones.”Riley’s Oakland, like Swift’s own West Coast, is rendered surreal by allegory. It has a housing crisis, police violence and rolling blackouts, but it also has a community of people who shrink to Lilliputian pocket size (they wear receipts for clothes) and a fast-food worker named Flora who can work at a Flash-like hyperspeed. There’s also a rogue white comics artist called the Hero who exacts vigilante justice on his largely Black neighbors — but even the idea of the fascistic law-and-order superhero seems pedestrian here. This show is not subtle about its vision or its allegories. “As a young Black man,” Cootie says, repeating his parents’ warnings, “if you walk down the street, and the police see that you don’t have a job, they send you directly to jail.” His new friends all laugh at his credulousness until one replies, “Metaphorically, that’s how it goes.”One of Cootie’s first rebellions is his insistence on trying a Bing Bang Burger, whose comically unappealing commercials he sees constantly on TV. We’re shown slack-jawed observers making videos before we see Cootie himself, standing in line, hunched over, his back pressed against the fluorescent lights of the burger joint. The actor Jharrel Jerome shows us Cootie’s trepidation by always playing him small, tilting his head against his shoulder, collapsing his frame inward, his lips in an expectant pucker. But when he sees Flora, assembling burgers with blurry speed, there’s a moment of connection. Cootie expands as she hands him his order and calls him “big man.” He bumps into the exit sign on the way out.It is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness.“I’m a Virgo” comes on the heels of a few ingenious experiments in TV surrealism, from “Atlanta” to “Undone” to the recent farce “Mrs. Davis.” Perhaps Amazon and Riley were emboldened by these examples or energized by the idea of transcending them, because this series has the courage of its confabulations. Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact, as it reminds us with proud bluntness. Drunk in the club, Cootie waxes poetic to his friend Felix: “Friends,” he says, “can help you feel the inside of yourself and the rest of the world at the same time.” Felix takes a minute to soak that in before he nods his head and responds, more or less, “Hey, bruh, that’s real.”Premium cable networks and streamers have long built their brands around boundary-pushing and risk, even as their prestige series often settle into safe, predictable formulas. Then there are properties like the ever-expanding Marvel Universe, which might once have used superheroes to dramatize truths about our own world but has now disappeared into its own multiverses, swallowed up by digital battles and green-screen vistas. “I’m a Virgo” is a visual and ideological counterpoint to all this. It uses the conceit of a 13-foot-tall Black man to reach for insights about race, class and injustice, and it is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness. Plenty of series mess around with television’s narrative structures or genre conventions, but this show is willing to break the most basic visual conventions of how you put humans together onscreen.Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact.And so Cootie has to be as real as television can make him. Most of his scenes are filmed using elaborate forced-perspective shots and scale models, not green screens or CGI. You can feel the difference. Cootie tends to look as if the walls are closing in, because they are. The show’s ramshackle, claustrophobic genius can be thrilling. I remember being stunned watching Christopher Nolan depict the depths of a wormhole using only practical effects; my awe was not dissimilar watching Boots Riley figure out how to shoot a slapstick, ultimately pretty sexy love scene between a normal-size woman and a 13-foot-tall man without leaning on digital effects for every frame. We see Flora and Cootie largely in close-ups, Flora centered neatly in her frame while Cootie fills his to the edges. There are occasional two-shots that use dolls as stand-ins, but mostly the scene uses sound to keep the actors in contact. The scene occupies nearly half its episode, as they work to figure out how their act of love can even be consummated, and Riley figures how to show it to us, and we learn how to see it — but it’s sweet, not leering. Usually, in Riley’s frame, the giant man is the real thing, and the world around him is either distorted or built anew. With Flora, whose own strangeness the show also honors and protects, the world reimagines itself in relation to the giant.The visual gags exist alongside other spectacular fantasies. One of Cootie’s friends organizes a general strike to protest the inequities of the health care system. There’s a guerrilla attack on a power plant. A vigilante cop is converted to communism. (What’s a wilder pitch: that the power of argument persuades a law-and-order ideologue to abandon carceral capitalism or that one kid in Oakland turns out to be really, really tall?) Riley, himself an avowed communist, has always been an unabashedly political artist, but what’s radical here isn’t the politics alone; it’s what the politics free the show to do. “I’m a Virgo” makes the idea of tearing up systems of power feel less destructive than boundless, and it does this by tethering its political vision to a revolution in the way we see human bodies onscreen. Its narrative feels almost spontaneous, teeming with strange and unexpected life. Riley has made his radicalism feel verdant, generative, self-sustaining. In the land of the only living giant, that’s real.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Prime VideoPhillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic and the author of the book “Avidly Reads Screen Time.” He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. More

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      in Music

      Pharrell Williams on His New Role at Louis Vuitton

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      Earlier this month, Pharrell Williams was in the men’s atelier on the second floor of Louis Vuitton’s corporate office in Paris, sunglasses on, surveying his new perch.“Listen,” he said conspiratorially. “This window is different.”The window by his desk looks out over the small plaza on the north side of the Pont Neuf, where in just a couple of weeks, his first show as Louis Vuitton men’s creative director would take place. A 50-foot statue of the artist Yayoi Kusama, a Vuitton collaborator, hovered just outside. The rapper Pusha T and the streetwear innovator Nigo were milling about.Since Mr. Williams’s appointment was announced in February, he has spent a great deal of his time here, in this office and in the workshops that abut it, getting accustomed to holding the reins of the huge business he had been put at the creative helm of — the first time a musician has been given such a grand platform in luxury fashion.“I pinch myself every day,” he said. “This is the equivalent of a castle to me. I mean, the Seine River right there — it’s like the moat.”The long path from his childhood in Virginia Beach through hip-hop producer stardom to streetwear design impact to pop music ubiquity to here was very much on his mind. “I’m a Black man — they have given this appointment to a Black man,” he said. “This is the crown jewel of the LVMH portfolio. It’s everything, and I was appointed to rule in this position. So No. 1, a ruler of a position is usually like a king. But a ruler of this position for me is a perpetual student. It’s what I intend to be.”A little bit later in the afternoon, Mr. Williams, 50, slipped off his blazer and slipped on a brown motorcycle jacket in full LV monogram print leather. Emblazoned on the back, in studs, were the words “PUPIL” and “KING.”His appointment to the helm of Vuitton’s men’s business is, depending on your perspective, a full-throated acknowledgment of the power of Black cultural capital on a global stage and a watershed moment in the absorption of hip-hop class politics into luxury fashion. Or it’s a bellwether of challenging times to come for traditionally trained clothing designers who aspire to top posts, and a suggestion that global celebrity moves the needle more than directional design, even for the most successful luxury brands.Either way, Mr. Williams did not apply for the job — he was chosen.In December, Alexandre Arnault, a scion of the LVMH dynasty and a longtime friend, sent Mr. Williams a text: “Please call me. The time has come.”Mr. Williams at the Vuitton men’s atelier with Nigo, the innovative streetwear designer with whom Mr. Williams founded Billionaire Boys Club.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesMr. Williams thought Mr. Arnault was perhaps going to run some name options by him for the Vuitton job. “I had been pushing somebody else,” he said. “I had been pushing Nigo. My brother, always.”Nigo — the founder of the brands A Bathing Ape and Human Made, the co-founder with Mr. Williams of Billionaire Boys Club and one of the most significant streetwear innovators — had already been named artistic director of Kenzo, another LVMH brand.Instead, Mr. Arnault extended the offer to Mr. Williams. “I had always wanted to work with him, in any way, shape or form since I started working in the group, which is already 10-plus years ago,” Mr. Arnault said. “And it was just never the right time because either the companies were too small to work with someone as big as him, or there were already people in charge, or he was working with Chanel. And stars were so aligned now, finally.”Mr. Williams said, “I’m not calling it fortune — I’m calling it favor.”Hiring Mr. Williams was one of the first decisions overseen by Pietro Beccari, a longtime LVMH executive, who was announced as chairman and chief executive of Louis Vuitton in January. “After Virgil, I couldn’t choose a classical designer,” Mr. Beccari said. “It was important that we found someone having a broader spectrum than being a very fantastic designer, which is great for the industry and we have many of them. But for that particular place, at Louis Vuitton, after Virgil, I thought we needed something more. Something that went beyond just pure design.”Mr. Williams signed the contract on Valentine’s Day and soon relocated his wife and four children and much of his team. “Listen, I miss my house in Miami,” he said. “And my house in Virginia. I really do. But right now, Paris is the center of the earth for me.”Playing the Game, or NotHis skin is as good as you think it is — the additional pressure, or labor, or scrutiny of his new position has left no creases.There was ease in his silhouette, too: a tight black double breasted vintage Vuitton blazer and well-worn white LV Trainer Snow Boots peeking out under bunched-up, flared dark bluejeans embroidered with faces derived from paintings by the Black artist Henry Taylor. The pants — one of a few pieces Mr. Williams has deployed Taylor’s work for — will appear in the spring-summer 2024 collection, which will be shown in Paris on June 20.He requested a tailor to come take a look at the hem of the jeans, which was a smidge too long on one side, and then sauntered over to the main conference table in the room, where he asked some colleagues to pull up images from his first ad campaign. It featured a pregnant Rihanna clutching multiple Louis Vuitton Speedy bags in primary colors, one of the first playful tweaks Mr. Williams is bringing to the company’s heritage. The Speedy, one of Louis Vuitton’s most recognizable designs, dates to 1930 and resembles a doctor’s bag.“I am a creative designer from the perspective of the consumer,” he said. “I didn’t go to Central Saint Martins. But I definitely went in the stores and purchased, and I know what I like.”Mr. Williams’s first ad campaign for Vuitton stars Rihanna, who clutches multiple Speedy bags.Louis VuittonHe told Mr. Beccari something similar. “He said, ‘I don’t feel like a creative director here, I feel like a client,’” Mr. Beccari recalled, adding that he trusted Mr. Williams’s natural instincts despite his never having managed a business of this scale. “I didn’t even have to speak to him about the commercial importance of what he does and the importance in terms of turnover and volume of sales, but just the importance in terms of impact.”Mr. Williams looked at his Rihanna ads the way one might pose after a particularly athletic dunk. He pointed to one and said, “That’s the golden ratio.” For emphasis, he had an associate pull up the same image overlaid with the long golden spiral, the center of it landing directly on Rihanna’s belly.“What I love about this is, it’s the biggest fashion house in the world, and that is a Black woman with child,” Mr. Williams said.Sarah Andelman, the founder of the pioneering Paris retailer Colette, and a collaborator of Mr. Williams’s, said he makes creative choices “not just for the sake of doing things. There is a story and, I would say in French, profondeur, a meaning to what he will do.”Mr. Williams basked in the refracted shine from the screen full of Rihanna images.“I know there’s a game,” he said. “I’m just not here to play it.”Mr. Williams at the men’s atelier. “A ruler of a position is usually like a king,” he said. “But a ruler of this position for me is a perpetual student. It’s what I intend to be.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesThe Two-Decade Crash CourseAlmost since the beginning of his career in music, Mr. Williams had found ways to incorporate, and create, fashion. In 2003, he founded Billionaire Boys Club with Nigo, perhaps his closest creative ally in style. Explaining the creative kinship between the two men, Nigo, through an interpreter, said, “The first time I went to Pharrell’s house in Virginia, when I looked in the wardrobe, everything was the same as what I owned.”In 2003, Mr. Williams met Marc Jacobs, then the men’s creative director of Vuitton, who invited him to collaborate on a pair of sunglasses. The result, known as the Millionaires, became a hip-hop luxury staple in the mid-2000s and an updated version of them is still sold today.“He was just so incredibly generous to give me that opportunity when nobody had ever given any of us an opportunity to be creative,” Mr. Williams said of Mr. Jacobs. (The Millionaires were designed by Mr. Williams, with Nigo.)“I thought the way forward for Louis Vuitton was to collaborate with other creatives,” Mr. Jacobs said. “It didn’t matter to me whether they were from music or art or other fashion designers, whether it was Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami or Pharrell.”Back then, when Mr. Williams arrived in Paris, Mr. Jacobs gave him vouchers to shop in the stores. “I was very nouveau riche at that time,” Mr. Williams said, tilting his head down and offering just the tiniest hint of a knowing smirk. Mr. Williams also designed jewelry for Vuitton a few years later.Other collaborations followed: Moncler, G-Star, Moynat, Reebok, a long partnership with Adidas and an almost decade-long affiliation with Chanel and Mr. Williams’s close friend Karl Lagerfeld.Mr. Williams met Marc Jacobs in the early aughts, when Mr. Jacobs was the men’s creative director at Vuitton.Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty ImagesMr. Williams and Karl Lagerfeld shared a close friendship and had a decade-long collaboration at Chanel.Swan Gallet/WWD, via Getty ImagesBut none of those gigs had the complexity, or stakes, of his current assignment.“Over the past several weeks he’s had a crash course in design and how to run a studio and how to manage a team of 40, 50 people and how to take criticism and work with the people at the top because, you know, it’s a blend of creativity and also running a business,” said Matthew Henson, who has been a personal stylist for Mr. Williams for the last couple of years.Mr. Henson is also styling the show, along with Cynthia Lu, Mr. Williams’s former assistant who is now a quiet powerhouse of idiosyncratic streetwear with her brand Cactus Plant Flea Market.When Mr. Williams walks through the studios, his awe for the specialized design teams appears genuine. “Presto, things get turned around so fast,” he said. “I’ve had more resources than I’ve ever had in my entire life. They just don’t miss. Like at all. None. Nobody.”That was something he was prepared for, in part, by conversations he had with Virgil Abloh, after Mr. Abloh was hired for this same job in 2018. In the three years at the helm of Vuitton’s men’s wear before his sudden death in late 2021, Mr. Abloh upended ideas about how a luxury house might function, and what story it might be able to tell in dialogue with those who had long been held at arm’s length from luxury fashion. Just outside the atelier hangs the crucial, defining image from Mr. Abloh’s first ad campaign for Louis Vuitton: a Black toddler draped in a “Wizard of Oz”-themed sweater, one of Mr. Abloh’s first signature pieces.Mr. Williams recalled Mr. Abloh’s awe at the scale and efficiency of the atelier. “He would always talk about how they never say no, which they don’t,” he said. “So that’s a responsibility not to abuse them.”Mr. Williams is now the second consecutive Black American in the role. “Over here, they lift us,” he said. “They appreciate what we do. They see the talent that we have.”Mr. Williams, in 2016, with Virgil Abloh, who as artistic director of Vuitton upended ideas of how a luxury house might function,Amy Sussman/WWD, via Getty ImagesThe Arnault family, he said, understands how crucial the Black American dollar and aesthetic has been to the growth and cachet of Louis Vuitton: “One hundred percent they know it,” he said. “We’ve had some conversations about how important the community is to them, and how being supportive to them is a natural and a prerequisite.”He is looking to expand the house’s brand ambassador program beyond the usual musicians and actors to Black academics, Black authors, a Black astrophysicist, even a Black bass fishing champion.“They have to be supportive of the culture because the culture contributes to the bottom line,” he said.A New HumilityThere are some things that Mr. Williams simply will not say. In public settings, at least, he speaks with the deliberateness of someone who wants no word to be misapprehended. His sunglasses stay on. (“I need something for myself,” he said.) Rhetorically, he returns to familiar narratives and motifs — the seismic changes in his life every 10 years, the eternal quest for learning, the continuing practice of gratitude.“He never speaks the truth of himself, and I hate it,” said Pusha T, who has known Mr. Williams for three decades. “It’s my pet peeve about him. He knows he’s great at things, but he wants that to walk him through the door versus him saying, ‘Hey guys, come on. Let me through.’”Squint hard, though, and you may see the faintest flickers of the mid-2000s Pharrell Williams, a more boisterous and boasty person. A whiff of the old self popped out in a video Mr. Williams posted in late January, backstage at the Kenzo show with Nigo, when he knew he was on the verge of signing his contract. “You know what rhymes with 2023? Money money tree,” he said into his phone camera, nodding intensely. He didn’t lick his lips, but he might as well have.When the appointment was announced, Tyler, the Creator, a longtime acolyte and style guru in his own right, FaceTimed Mr. Williams. “He just has this look he gives me where he kind of just goes like, ‘Yeahhhh, I did that.’ He didn’t say anything,” Tyler said. “And then he gave me the praying hands.”Mr. Williams performing at Roseland in New York in 2004. Rahav Segev for The New York TimesOn his 2006 mixtape “In My Mind: The Prequel,” a dizzying display of Dionysian ostentation, a peacock at the peak of his peacocking, Mr. Williams rapped, “We wanted this life, we salivated like wolves/ Blow a hundred grand on LV leather goods.”Mr. Williams almost flinched at the memory: “I was greeeeeasy on that.”Now, he said, “I promise you I really love being humble.” But luxury fashion is not a business built on humility, and Mr. Williams is keen to make a splash.The theme of his debut show, Mr. Williams said, will be “lovers.” The first inklings of his vision emerged in April, at a Virginia festival that Mr. Williams organizes called Something in the Water, for which Vuitton made merch. It was received coolly.Of potential negative criticism, Mr. Williams pleads equanimity. “I’m a student — students learn,” he said.Mr. Henson said he didn’t think Mr. Williams was expecting any “grace or favor” because of who he is. “He’s expecting even more criticism and harsh critique,” he said.Mr. Williams shrugged. “It’s not where my mind is, just because I think I err on the side of working with master artisans, and we’re just literally working on the details,” he said.Staying CuriousAn afternoon with Mr. Williams in creative director mode is a little bit like playing a first-person shooter. Requests pop in from unexpected directions, at erratic rhythms. Just when things get calm, someone emerges from around a corner with a mood board, or a vintage garment and a swatch of fabric it might be reimagined in. After being shown a hood with a novel but useful zipper, Mr. Williams nodded. “I don’t want anything to be just for aesthetics,” he said. “Everything has to have a real function.”For the second day in a row, he was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt by Human Made, this time underneath a soft black leather biker jacket, and his flared jeans were in a Damier pattern.A tailor brought out a mock-up of a double-breasted blazer for Mr. Williams to try on. One of the designers asked if he wanted “a very sartorial pocket” added to the design.“Sartorial,” Mr. Williams said. “Do you follow that guy on Instagram? The Sartorialist?”At the Louis Vuitton workshop in the days before his debut collection is unveiled. Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesFor his first collection, he is leaning heavily on the checkerboard Damier print but reworking it in clever ways — digital camo or, in Mr. Williams’s parlance, “damouflage,” and tweaking the colors away from the familiar browns and grays.“Every season it’s going to be a different colorway,” he said, likening the playfulness to Takashi Murakami’s neon monogram print during the Jacobs era. The soles of various shoes will be a modified Damier pattern. On a conference table were a pair of damoflage sweatsuits set aside for his parents (“My dad is a player,” he said.)Mr. Williams, who made waves in 2007 with his oversize purple crocodile Hermès Haut à courroies bag, is most tickled by the opportunity to innovate on the Speedy, which he is remaking in several primary colors, and also in an exaggerated, oversize silhouette. A yellow Speedy in meltingly soft leather sat on the pool table that serves as an impromptu work space in the atelier, almost slumping under its own very light weight.“I want to give you that same experience that you get when you go to Canal Street, a place that has appropriated the house for decades, right?” Mr. Williams said. “Let’s reverse it. Let’s get inspired by the fact that they’ll make some colorways that the house has never made. But then let’s actually make it the finest of leather.”The day before, Mr. Williams had taken a moment to chat about designing a custom look for Naomi Campbell, including a zipped sports bra and zipped miniskirt, all in monogrammed leather (“’60s vibes, go-go”), and debating skirt lengths. “It’ll work, but I don’t know if it’ll be as sexy,” he said.He also surveyed a pair of ship-shaped bag options, one steamer-like, one a bit shorter, and picked from various trim color and font options. “This seems to be the crispiest,” he said, pointing to a white trim. He held one bag in each hand, then handed them to Nigo, who stomped off down the office in a mock model walk.What Nigo did for Mr. Williams two decades ago, Mr. Williams is now doing for those who grew up admiring him.“Me and him have a 20-year difference in age and man, what that does for me at my age is like, oh, it’s still no ceilings,” Tyler said. “To see someone at his age with his milestones, with his résumé, to not only still strive for a new world, stay curious, look for something new and something to challenge himself and let his creativity bleed into something else aside from just a drum pattern. And then actually get it. He not only strived for and did it, but actually nailed it — it means so much to me.”Mr. Williams’s new designs include printed leather jerseys and rugbys, quilted denim, Mao-neck blazers and ghillie camo with LV logo cutouts. He was excited to walk to the back of the studio, where the footwear designers work, and go over some eccentric ideas: Mary Janes and bowling shoes, a stone-encrusted snowboard boot, a design that initially scanned as a soccer sneaker but is actually a hard-bottom shoe. “I ain’t even gonna lie,” he said. “I was trying to do that at Adidas for years.”A little earlier, he was in front of his window, where he’d set up a small studio, and while fiddling with his Keystation 88 — a keyboard and sound controller — he asked his engineer to cue up a new song, tentatively called “Chains ’n Whips,” that he was considering using as part of the show’s soundtrack. Over a fusillade of psych-rock guitar flourishes, Pusha T rapped along to a pointed line in the chorus: “Beat the system with chains and whips!”“That was made in this room,” Mr. Williams said. “We just start walking around and looking out this window and you just see all of this. I mean, we beating this system, bro.” More

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      Review: ‘The Whitney Album’ Looks to Theater to Remake a Painful Past

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      Eschewing a conventional narrative, Jillian Walker’s soulful show seeks to heal deep wounds through ritual and celebratory singalongs.In “The Whitney Album,” a heady and ritualistic new show that recently opened at Soho Rep, the playwright and actor Jillian Walker uses Whitney Houston as an object lesson: The pressures heaped on gifted and famous Black women, Walker suggests, are stifling, destructive and rooted in colonial subjugation.Unlike the pop-diva-inspired musicals proliferating uptown, “The Whitney Album” eschews a hit catalog for a soundtrack that’s sui generis, with percussive body movements, a cappella solos and, eventually, a group singalong. The director Jenny Koons’s production unfolds — on a mostly white stage (designed by Peiyi Wong), with a brass singing bowl gleaming down center — as a kind of happening, unconcerned with conventional narrative. The show assumes the style of what Walker might call “a vibe.”After offering a warm welcome, the playwright delivers a lecture about the power of theater to remake history (“the archive is the unsung silence,” she says). Dense with academic syntax and punctuated by elemental rites (like the pouring of water or sand from one vessel to another), “The Whitney Album” blends intellectual theory and ceremony to the point of abstraction. (Walker studied to become an Afro-Indigenous priest, she says, after being passed over for a prestigious full-time professorship.)The actor Stephanie Weeks joins Walker onstage, and the two trade off playing Houston and the women she was closest to — her mother and a longtime confidante — in scenes fraught with the stress of celebrity. (The sound designer Ben Jalosa Williams, who operates an onstage board, briefly plays the role of an impatient white interviewer.) Walker likens Houston’s prodigious perspiration to the sweat, tears and saltwater graves of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, tracing the consumption and disposal of Black women over three centuries. It’s a powerful argument, at once persuasive and oversimplified. (“The Whitney Album” does not extend to consider today’s Black female pop stars, like Beyoncé, for example, who maintain a high degree of control over their labor and publicity.)The show’s shuffle of forms — including direct address, re-enactment, live and recorded vocals — can feel like an especially soulful, high-concept record that’s more evocative than linear. But its piled-up ideas, many of them couched in esoteric language that’s not easy to parse in a 90-minute performance, ultimately don’t cohere into a moving or insightful whole.Walker’s passion and intellect seem to place her along the continuum of artists and scholars she calls out by first name — like Saidiya, Lauryn and bell, among others. But how can Walker avoid participating in the cycle of consumption she aims to critique? It’s a question that she proves has no easy answers.The Whitney AlbumThrough July 2 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Horace Tapscott, a Force in L.A. Jazz, Is Celebrated in a New Set

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      “60 Years,” a compilation marking the 60th anniversary of his Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, spotlights the pianist and community organizer, who died in 1999.There’s a name engraved in the sidewalk along Degnan Boulevard in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood: Horace Tapscott, the local pianist and organizer whose ensemble, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, gave many musicians their first gigs and helped heal a community impacted by racism.“He saved Los Angeles when it comes to progressive music,” said the vocalist Dwight Trible, a performer with the Arkestra since 1987, in a telephone interview. “Because if you were going to get involved in that, you had to come through Horace Tapscott.”Tapscott started the group in 1961 and maintained it until his death in 1999, at 64. Yet his name has never rung as loudly outside of L.A. He didn’t tour much and his albums of vigorous Afrocentric jazz weren’t released on mainstream record labels. A new compilation titled “60 Years,” out Friday, may change that.The double LP set collects unreleased songs from every decade of the Arkestra’s existence, up to its present-day iteration with the drummer Mekala Session at the helm. Through a mix of home and live recordings, along with written track-by-track breakdowns from past and present members in the album’s liner notes, “60 Years” offers perspective on a group that’s largely flown under the radar.Featuring Bill Madison on drums; David Bryant on bass; Lester Robertson on trombone; and Arthur Blythe, Jimmy Woods and Guido Sinclair on saxophone; the Arkestra started in Tapscott’s garage and grew dramatically over the following 17 years.Tapscott founded the band and the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension, an artists’ collective, to provide more gigs for progressive jazz musicians living in L.A., and to get local children involved in the arts. His own journey in music began when he was young; his mother, Mary Lou Malone, was a stride pianist and tuba player and as a teen he played trombone locally before entering the Air Force.After a tour of the South with the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s band, he wasn’t enamored with life on the road. During a stop in L.A., where Tapscott had lived since he was 9, he hopped off Hampton’s tour bus for good. “No one discovered I was gone until they got to Arizona,” he said in a 1982 interview.“He was way more interested in feeling and sounding like himself with his friends, who were also really unique,” Session said on a video call from Los Angeles. Still, Tapscott’s mission stretched beyond music. During the Watts riots in 1965, he had the band play in the middle of the road on a flatbed truck. (Police responded, with guns drawn.) They group would often perform in churches, community centers, prisons and hospitals for little to no money, and at benefits for Black Panther leaders, drawing attention from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Though Tapscott released his first album, “The Giant Is Awakened,” with a separate quintet in 1969, his debut LP with the Arkestra didn’t arrive until “The Call,” a mix of bluesy ballads and orchestral arrangements with grand flourishes, in 1978. Along the way, noted musicians and vocalists like Nate Morgan, Kamau Daaood, Adele Sebastian and Phil Ranelin played in the band.Trible came across Tapscott in the late 1980s as a singer in another group who wanted to work with the Arkestra. Two weeks after they performed separately at a festival, Tapscott offered an invitation. “He said, ‘I want you to come to my house tomorrow at 3 o’clock,’ and he hung up the phone,” Trible remembered with a laugh. “And just about every concert that Horace played from that time on, I sang with him in some capacity.”Trible performed a fiery rendition of “Little Africa,” a rapturous gospel song, with the current version of the Arkestra at National Sawdust in Brooklyn earlier this month. The festive night of shouts and praise featured older and younger Arkestra members, and served as a showcase for Session, the band’s leader since 2018; Mekala is the son of the saxophonist Michael Session, who led the band before him.In an interview before the gig, Session recalled joining the band as a teen. “I’m 13 and my first gig with the Ark is with Azar Lawrence,” he exclaimed, referring to the noted saxophonist and sideman to Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and Freddie Hubbard. “It’s actually a very humbling thing to be a medium, a conduit for the ancestors trying to spread this vibration as far and as hard as possible.”The idea for the compilation arose shortly after the band’s 50th anniversary, which came and went without much fanfare. The collective vowed to not let that happen for its 60th. “We were like, ‘We’re going to make a product that will introduce a bunch of people to this band in a way that’s comprehensive and concise,” Session said. “This is for us, by us. We wanted to present something to the people from the band that can directly pay the band and support the band, and then be turned into other projects. It’s the first time the Ark has been able to do that, really.”Renewed interest in Tapscott and the Arkestra dates back at least seven years, when a new crop of L.A. jazz musicians — including the bassist Thundercat, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington and the producer and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin — helped the superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar create his avant jazz-rap opus “To Pimp a Butterfly,” shedding light on the city’s still-fertile jazz scene. Since then, various labels have reissued Tapscott’s work. But the music on “60 Years,” remastered from old cassettes and CDs, hasn’t been heard beyond the Arkestra.Six decades since Tapscott formed the band, Session said the group’s mission hasn’t changed, and he vowed to continue pushing forward. “I want to get weirder. I want to get back to how Horace did shows at prisons and high schools and colleges for free,” he said. “We could sell out Carnegie Hall and then come home and do the same set for 50, 60 cats. I want that balance. It sounds impossible, but we can do it.” More

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      ‘Menace II Society’ at 30: A Bleak Nightmare Then, a Milestone Now

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      With a tragic hero at its heart, the Hughes brothers’ debut drama painted nuanced portraits of characters rarely fleshed out in other films.When it was released 30 years ago, “Menace II Society” was a shock to the system.Maybe because the trailer conveyed a sense of optimism amid scenes of Black urban life, many moviegoers were expecting another “Boyz N the Hood,” which had met with universal acclaim two years earlier. Both were coming-of-age dramas set in tough Los Angeles neighborhoods. And both involved a hero who is put to the test and a key character who dies.In “Boyz,” that hero, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Tre, survives. Hell, he thrives: the movie ends with him leaving to attend Morehouse College. In that hopeful narrative, the main character escapes. Not so in “Menace.” It is about those who cannot escape, the thousands of boys who grow into men trapped by circumstances. If “Boyz N the Hood” was a dream that few got to experience, “Menace II Society” was the reality of those who were left behind.The debut of the directors Albert and Allen Hughes with a script by Tyger Williams — all in their 20s at the time — “Menace” tells the story of Caine (Tyrin Turner), who moves in with his grandparents after his mother dies of a drug overdose and his father is killed in a drug deal gone wrong. But he’s really raised by Pernell, played by Glenn Plummer, and other denizens of the streets. Caine himself is dealing drugs and stealing cars to get by. He’s best friends with the unapologetic killer O-Dog, played magnificently by Larenz Tate, and has feelings for Ronnie (Jada Pinkett), who has a baby with the now-imprisoned Pernell. But Caine makes decisions that prove to be his undoing. In true tragic-hero fashion, he brings about his own demise. He fathers a baby, then refuses to claim it, setting out on a path that ultimately leads to his death at the hands of a cousin of the baby’s mother.Partly what makes “Menace” (available on most major platforms) such a rich film is the surprising number of characters who are fully fleshed out — not just Caine but also O-Dog, a murderer who is also supportive of friends and gentle with children. Even the man who kills Caine is given layers: he is tender with his cousin, and his love for her sets him on a collision course with Caine. The cousin goes unnamed but he isn’t depicted like the antagonists in “Boyz N the Hood,” who are treated with as much care as gangsters in Grand Theft Auto.John Singleton, second from right, working with Ice Cube, in the car, and Cuba Gooding Jr. on “Boyz N the Hood.”Columbia PicturesThe film makes a point of exploring how Caine’s circumstances plays a major role in shaping him — whether it’s his upbringing by an addicted mother and dealer father, or his boyhood interactions with Pernell, who allows him to drink beer and hold his first gun. He then witnesses his father murder a man over a card game. It’s clear that Caine did not choose this life; this is the world as he found it. And though his determination not to care for his child is unquestionably the wrong decision, he is using the logic he inherited. We hear his inner monologue. He is trying to do the right thing, he just does not know how. Compared with the others around him, Caine is relatively moral.“Menace” was part of a ’90s wave of gritty urban films centered on Black leads that included “South Central” (1992) as well as “Boyz.” The $3 million “Menace” was a success with audiences (making $30 million at the box office) and critics alike. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called it “brilliant, and unsparing,” and both Siskel and Ebert put the film on their lists of the best films of 1993.Thanks to their initial hit, the Hughes brothers were able to make “Dead Presidents” two years later, about a Black Vietnam veteran who resorts to robbing banks to feed his poverty-stricken family. Both films show filmmakers interested in exploring the systemic conditions in America that give rise to the tragedy at the core of the Black experience.Albert Hughes has said that “Menace” was made for white people, and it was lampooned as part of an overall goof on the genre in “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” (1996). Still, Gucci Mane, A$AP Rocky and Lil Wayne have all referenced “Menace” in their music, and a younger Kanye West noted that it was one of his “most watched” films.Kiese Laymon, the novelist and author of “Heavy: An American Memoir,” told me, “It was the first film that my friends and I memorized every word.” He added, “O-Dog was mesmerizing. Some of us liked talking like him. A few of us liked acting like him. That had deadly consequences for one or two of us.”Indeed “Menace II Society” has become a cornerstone in Black households, required watching alongside “The Color Purple,” “Malcolm X” and, yes, “Boyz N the Hood.”“Menace” isn’t perfect, of course. The women are hardly three-dimensional. Caine’s mother is no more than a crackhead who fails to raise him, while Ronnie has little to do other than be a dutiful mother and romantic interest. But the legacy of this film cannot be overstated. As the critic Caryn James wrote in The New York Times when the film was released, “The movie’s very bleakness — not the moviemakers’ youth — is what makes ‘Menace II Society’ so radical, so rare and so important.” More