Lysistrata Update Chi-Raq Is a Marvel

O, Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I’ll bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’s 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare a truce. With Lee’s Chi-Raq, Lysistrata’s vow never to “extend my Persian slippers toward the ceiling” — or, in Lee’s modern slang, “total abstinence from knocking the boots” — melds perfectly with the present. Teyonah Parris’s headstrong and radiant Lysistrata struts through the streets in camouflage hot pants, all ripe cleavage and chains.

Lee’s updated heroine has “a mind like Einstein and a truly luscious behind,” drools narrator Dolmedes (Samuel L. Jackson), which is a snortingly perfect name for a character who’s half Greek chorus, half Rudy Ray Moore. More perilously, she’s the girlfriend of Spartan gang leader Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), who’s entrenched in an endless shootout with the rival Trojans, headed by one-eyed thug Cyclops (Wesley Snipes in a bedazzled eyepatch). The wise woman next door (Angela Bassett) schools the girl that young life shouldn’t be so intertwined with death. Until then, Lysistrata had simply accepted violence as fact. Now she’ll end it with a rebellion. “No peace, no pussy,” she and her ladies growl, and the entire city flips out. Yelps strip-club owner Morris (Dave Chappelle), whose stages are empty and customers disgruntled: “These ho’s have shut down the penis power grid!”

Chi-Raq is a marvel. It’s Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned and funny as hell — just when we need to hear it. He opens the film with a rap that reads like an incantation to the gods. “Please pray 4 my city,” pleads Cannon, and then the screen fills with statistics: In the past fifteen years, 2,379 Americans have died in Iraq. In that same period, 7,356 have died in Chicago alone.

Lee is furious at a system that bolsters senseless violence. More specifically, he’s after the swinging dicks who support it, be they passive villains — like bankers who keep the inner cities broke by refusing to loan money to poor would-be entrepreneurs — or the blind-eyed bullies of the NRA. Everyone is guilty, from the stand-your-ground goons on the street and the brutes bloodying the police force’s image to foot soldiers like Chi-Raq and Cyclops. “We’re doing their work for them,” laments one wounded gang member, now in diapers and a wheelchair.

It’s astonishing how well it all works. Who would have guessed that a 2,500-year-old sex comedy would feel like the freshest film of 2015? Or that Lee and co-writer Kevin Willmott could pull off an entire script in rhyme while wedging in MAD magazine gags, like a racist general who humps a cannon in Confederate-flag underwear — an idea that sounds musty but had the entire theater howling? Aristophanes would be having a blast. Both he and Lee loved to pick fights with their contemporaries, whether Euripides or Tyler Perry, and they loved to name names. The original Lysistrata called out a dozen warmongering local politicians, and Lee takes license to do the same. He packs the script with references to Dylann Roof and Condoleezza Rice. But more than that, he’s focused on chanting the names that hurt, almost as though they give his movie strength: Sandy Hook, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Tamir Rice.

Forgive Chi-Raq its tonal shifts between comedy and tragedy, which can feel like a ride in a parabolic rocket. One minute you’re giggling at Dolmedes’s boast that he was “weaned on Thunderbird from my mama’s titty,” and suddenly John Cusack, a Chicago boy himself, is giving a sermon at a child’s funeral that is Lee’s blaring call to arms: “We go from third-rate schools to first-class, high-tech prisons,” Cusack’s pastor screams, his voice close to breaking. Outside the church, the dead girl’s mother (Jennifer Hudson) is the only character who doesn’t speak in couplets — her plain anguish cuts through the chatter.