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As the only person in Jesus’s life who’s got more on his mind than moneybags, he is in substantial ways the purest moral force in the movie.

SPIKE LEE JORDANS 40 PRICES MOVIE

It isn’t lost on the movie that Jake is caught in a staggering double-bind. The movie is an unsettling mixture of pulp and polemic, with old tropes-a jailbird promised freedom if he works on behalf of the state, a daddy issue–laden hero with a God complex, Samson and Delilah, a hooker with a heart of gold-recombined to assert an aggressive political point.

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The opening credits are scored not to music of the moment, but to the clamoring, industrial lyricism of “John Henry,” Aaron Copland’s 1940 symphonic portrait of the 19th-century black folk hero and steel driver who, the story goes, took American labor capital to task in a one-man race against a steam-powered hammer. But even by those standards, He Got Game’s opening moments are daringly incongruous. By 1998, Lee had established himself as a director with, among other things, an incisive musical palette: films like Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing are as memorable for their evocative needle drops- Stevie Wonder and Public Enemy, respectively-as they are for their politics or Lee’s whirligig visual style. There’s more at stake here, it tells us, than merely the travails of man and sport. The opening sequence is practically an anthem in images. Next: this is a story broad enough to encompass street ball, the pro leagues, and everything and everyone in between, from the shadows of the Twin Towers to the prairies, to Chicago’s since-demolished Cabrini-Green projects.

And the bodies playing it are united in this beauty, even as time, space, gender, and color differentiate them. It’s a credit sequence that doubles as a mission statement. They’re shooting hoops: posing, dribbling, showing off, bodies jostling against each other, breathing the sport of basketball to life in wondrous slow motion. Spike Lee’s film opens on soaring, enormous images of unrepentantly American cities and plains, with men and women of every color-but mostly men, and mostly black and white-pictured in backyards and fields, on boardwalks, beside abandoned gas stations, and in fenced-off basketball courts neighboring the projects. Whether or not you remember how it ends, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely been unable to shake how He Got Game begins.

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