Chris Rock’s Top Five isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it’s undoubtedly the coolest.
It’s the movie I’d most want to hang out with, as a fly on the wall of its hyper-realistically detailed locations: under the unforgiving lights of a comedy club, in the nihilistic privacy of a luxury hotel, in the Cristal-popping velvet booths of a strip club — even in a jail cell, where famous rappers materialize in hilariously self-deprecating cameos of magic realism. Anything can happen in this stylized satire of Hollywood hedonism, insecurity and artificiality.
Top Five has the whiplash-inducing distinction of encompassing both saturnalia and social comment; it’s simultaneously the most shockingly vulgar and shockingly mature film Rock has made as writer-director. It’s unflinchingly honest in its portrayal of the entertainment industry as a merciless wood chipper about to consume Andre Allen (Rock), a recovering drug addict and former bad boy of comedy whose attempt to reinvent himself in a high-minded period film about the Haitian Revolution is about to tank at the box office.
The movie is set in a whirlwind 24 hours for Allen, on the eve of both his movie opening and his marriage, to the talentless star of a vapid Bravo reality show (Gabrielle Union) who insists on framing their kisses just right for the cameras. “If it’s not on camera, it doesn’t exist,” she says, encompassing the exhibitionist ethos of the 21st century celebutante in eight words.
We watch as Andre spends hours before his bachelor party on a torturous tour of interviews and press junkets, from a professorial Charlie Rose Q&A to the asinine questions of talk-radio shock-jocks. Most of them just want Andre to be funny again, to recapture the “magic” of his most famous role, as a crime-fighting bear in a studio franchise.
The coincidence of Oscar season release dates begs a comparison to Birdman, which similarly centers on its own actor reinventing himself from a life of embodying a juvenile product. A better comparison would reach back to Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories — surely influence No. 1 for Rock this time around, who even borrowed its director’s surname, and whose character tries to outrun the shadow of his “early, funny” films.
Yet Rock’s Stardust Memories is funnier than Allen’s, borrowing its perceptiveness but not its bitterness. The humor is outsized and uproarious: Foreign objects unwillingly enter anuses, Rock goes ballistic on a supermarket store display, and Jerry Seinfeld incongruously makes it rain in a strip club. The scene for which the film will be most remembered (and, to certain viewers, most reviled) is a hotel bacchanal involving hookers, cocaine, disemboweled pillows and an impossible sleazy Cedric the Entertainer. It’s presented as a flashback, set in Houston in 2003, and in its comedic cherry on top, Rock cuts away to a photograph of a smiling George W. Bush on the hotel room wall.
The film derives its humanity and sweetness from his character’s relationship with Chelsea Brown (Rosario Dawson), a New York Times reporter who shadows Andre for most of the day for a profile. Their relationship evolves, perhaps all too conveniently, from combative disdain to irrepressible lust, which Andre tries to resist as matrimony looms around the corner. The mechanics of the movie’s romantic triangle begin to feel a bit rote and mechanical, less convincing than its showbiz critique.
But then again, Rock is a secret softie for the vagaries of romantic attraction, lest we forget that he remade an Eric Rohmer film into 2007’s I Think I Love My Wife. Top Five has some Rohmerian caprice in it too, along with the grossness of a Todd Phillips comedy, the Inside Baseball jargon of a whole season of Entourage and the convivial geekiness of High Fidelity (the title, which becomes a recurring theme, derives from a scene in which Andrew polls his friends and family on their top five hip-hop artists. As Top Five moviegoers spill out of the auditorium, expect many to be listing their own).
Few directors would have the temerity to risk combining all of these approaches, but you’ll marvel at how well they mesh.
TOP FIVE. Director: Chris Rock; Cast: Chris Rock, Rosario Dawson, Gabrielle Union, J.B. Smoove, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart, Cedric the Entertainer, Doug Stanhope, DMX; Distributor: Paramount; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most area theaters