Highest 2 Lowest is a film of dialectics. That should come as no surprise to long-time admirers of Spike Lee. The 68-year-old trailblazing auteur thrives off centering his stories around people with opposing perspectives being forced to reckon with one another. In fact, the director of Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman would likely aconsider it a dereliction of duty to allow a single viewer of any of his movies to leave the theater unprovoked. All those films—even his last feature, Da 5 Bloods—are ingeniously disguised arenas for philosophical debate.
And so it goes for Lee's latest joint, Highest 2 Lowest. The story follows David King, a legendary New York music mogul who is trying to raise millions of dollars to retake control of his label when a kidnapping and ransom demand throws his family and professional life into crisis. It's laden with weighty themes ranging from contemporary (generational tensions through technology) to ancient (knowledge vs. ignorance).
Actually, most of the themes in this story are downright Socratic. It's a stark contrast to Bloods, which deals with more grounded, tangible themes such as family, duty and PTSD. In fact, everything about H2L feels like a direct counter to its predecessor. The reasoning behind that remains a mystery but it might've been something as simple as Lee getting homesick. Arguably the world's most "New York" filmmaker hadn't set a movie in New York in over a decade, and now that he was coming home, I'm sure he was determined to do it in style.
Mo' Better Blues to Highest 2 Lowest
Enter Denzel. This marked the fifth team-up between Denzel Washington and Spike Lee. Their first four films were already in the conversation for the best of any actor-director duo in the history of American cinema. Based on the overwhelmingly positive reaction thus far, Highest 2 Lowest is poised to become a fitting cap on their shared filmography.
It's also a perfect bookend with their first feature film, Mo' Better Blues (1990), a living portrait of a talented young jazz musician balancing passion, love, and loyalty in the heat of New York nightlife. Rewatching it after finishing H2L, the parallels between them are so strong that my Marvel-addled brain began thinking of 2025 Denzel's character in H2L as a variant of 1990 Denzel's "Bleek Gilliam." In this alternate Mo' Better Blues world, Bleek still hits rock bottom and turns to a lost love to save his soul. Except in this version, he is rejected. Cornered and desperate now, Bleek retreats to his first love, music.
He can't play because he still suffers the tragic injury that ended his career in the original movie, but this time he devotes himself to hearing and learning music. He becomes far better at hearing good music than he ever was at playing it, and decides to launch his own label. After rattling off several chart-topping hits in rapid succession, Bleek feels transformed. He makes it official by legally changing his name to reflect both his unlikely, yet seemingly fateful rise to power, along with the last name of one of the only men he considered his equal in disseminating wisdom to the masses. Thus, David King is born.
In Spike Lee's version, the kidnapping forces King to reckon with what he's willing to sacrifice for the well being of the people he cares for, while also trying to balance morality with reality. The story is, in Lee's words, a "reimagining" of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 film High and Low and it's easy to see what attracted Lee to the project. The plot ultimately distills its themes into two characters with (you guessed it) diametrically opposed perspectives on the world.
On one side, we have King, who has quite literally reached the mountaintop (much of the film takes place inside a stunning penthouse apartment in DUMBO). King is consistently portrayed as a man with integrity and wisdom and a propensity to share that wisdom with anyone he deems in need of it (spoiler: everyone). He's an optimist. An idealist. King never loses his cool because deep down he knows things will swing his way.
King's counterpart is his son's kidnapper. He is brash, angry and has a particularly venomous attitude towards King. Standard villain stuff, at first, but the character becomes a little more three-dimensional as the story progresses.
Rocky's valiant fight [SPOILERS AHEAD]
The kidnapper is mainly a disembodied voice on the phone for the first half of the film, during which the plot revolves around a series of conversations between him and King. Denzel is that rare level of actor who can compel simply by talking on the phone, but it takes more than that to hold the attention of an audience for a whole hour. Unfortunately, the supporting cast, which includes Jeffrey Wright playing King's employee and close confidant and Ilfenesh Hadera playing King's wife, isn't given much to do, and doesn't do much with what they're given.
A series of clues eventually lead King himself to discover the identity of the kidnapper. An aspiring local rapper known as "Yung Felon," portrayed by real-life rapper A$AP Rocky. The final act of the film starts with King and Paul Christopher (Wright) setting out on a vigilante mission to retrieve King's money. For just a split-second, it feels like we might be headed for an Equalizer ending which I'm ashamed to admit I was kind of rooting for at that point.
Instead, the climax of the film comes inside a run-down recording studio where King has tracked down Yung Felon. What ensues is a conversation essentially via a rap battle. If you told me before watching this film that it peaked with the protagonist and antagonist having a rap battle, I would probably skip the movie altogether. That's the kinda cheese that immortalizes a film in the absolute wrong way, but this is Spike Lee we're talking about. The man has made a career off turning cheese into gourmet dining.
The scene is captivating and effective. Denzel is mesmerizing, and Rocky does a surprisingly good job keeping up. It's a bit of brilliant meta-narrative from Lee here, as well. Pitting Denzel Washington against A$AP Rocky in a movie isn't exactly the same as pitting Tom Cruise against Jack Nicholson, but Lee levels the playing field by placing the story inside the world the real A$AP Rocky lives and thrives in.
Spike's most shocking (and disappointing) plot twist
Despite the slow start, the recording studio showdown left me feeling closer to the consensus positive reaction to this film but, in signature fashion, Lee had a couple more endings in store. A second meeting through a sheet of glass occurs between King and Felon, this time in prison. Felon is now the most-streamed artist online thanks to the publicity from the crime, and he asks King to sign him to his label so he can finally realize his dream of working with his idol, even if it would be entirely confined to a prison cell for decades.
King not only turns him down but, when Felon responds with blind rage, he mocks Felon. Despite Young Felon spilling his soul to him, despite the pair developing what appeared to be the seeds of a father-son-style relationship, King (and, by proxy, Spike Lee) coldly rejects him as another common criminal.
It's a stunning betrayal of Spike Lee's own doctrine. No matter the person or perspective, each side of a Lee-sanctioned debate is taken seriously, and the "winner" is either besides the point or absent altogether. Not this film. David King is proven in the right at every turn. He is anointed with a title that Lee seemed to spend his entire career railing against. The "Good Guy."
Highest 2 Lowest isn't a bad movie. Denzel's continued excellence is worth giving it a go on its own, but Spike Lee superfans might watch this film and find themselves thinking back to Mo' Better one last time, with Shadow Henderson's (Wesley Snipes) words to Bleek ringing in their ears: "It's all bull****. Everything, everything you just said is bull****. Out of all the people in the world, you never gave anybody else, and look, I love you like a step-brother, but you never gave nobody else a chance t- to play their own music..."
I'm thrilled to see Spike Lee and Denzel Washington get an opportunity to take even a small victory lap at this moment in their long, storied careers. But I also can't help but be left feeling a little disappointed by the ultimate message of Highest 2 Lowest. I still very much look forward to the next Spike Lee joint. I hope it's just more of exactly that. A joint effort with joint perspectives and ideologies.
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