Looking for Langston (1989)

A lush, seamless integration of exquisite footage into a cinematic meditation revolving around the alleged homosexuality of Langston Hughes. Whether it was so or not, is harmlessly irrelevant; Essex Hemphill and Isaac Julien also offer us a powerful short-circuit between beauty, art and politics. How much Langston Hughes was involved into this gives more relief to the inquiry.

And such electric charge between the muse (Beauty, a staggeringly handsome man) and the poet. Watch that kiss, and you'll know this is a rare example on screen of tenderness and engagement contra the usual hastiness that surrounds such encounters, reminding us that passion is not a lustful precipitated affair only, but takes on a rhythm that is as political as poetic. (Perhaps Essex Hemphill's verses are more ambitious than inspired here, compared to the ones in "Tongues Untied," but the reciting is again exemplary.)

Add to that a pinch of triangulated passion by a white rival. (Or is it not a rival, since his presence obscenely suggests Beauty is rent, making all the more ambiguous and powerful the meditation?) And contrast to it the serene, exquisite presence of the actor portraying the poet, and the jazzy poet himself reciting with a terrific sense of rhythm some of his verse, ambivalently resounding in the end; matching his voice, the gripping voice of Toni Morrison reading James Baldwin in the beginning for great effect. And affect.

The cinematography is superb, evoking George Platt Lynes, a voyeur of the Harlem Renaissance.

A film on a par with Jean Genet's landmark "Un Chant d' Amour" and Derek Jarman's poetic studies.