DN:FILM Don’t Be Nice
Solo or in teams, the slam poets deploy body and voice, shouting rapid-fire rhythms, hurling hip-hop word bombs, articulating life’s panorama: the racial and the sexual; personal and familial; political, social and speaking truth to power. It’s a scene that’s found small stages and open mikes and lively, vocal audiences who judge performers—these slam poets—on scales of zero to 10 based on verve, style and substance. It is merciless and mesmerizing. The performers sweat. The crowd goes wild.
Spotlighted in Max Powers’ roller-coaster DON’T BE NICE are five artists in their 20s, a mix of African-American, Afro-Hispanic and queer poets who qualified—out of 100 contenders—for the Bowery Slam Poetry Team in New York in the summer of 2016. Now the five young people have nine weeks to write, forge and finesse killer cadences for the National Poetry Slam in Atlanta—an oral Olympiad. Under the astute coaching of Lauren Whitehead, a black woman with a martinet’s mien, and Jon Sands, a soft-spoken, self-described "straight white man," these staunch performers convene in living-room workshops and unburden their beings with verbal virtuosity, bouncing poems off each other, taking prickly feedback, and growing mightier with each chiseled stanza.
Both instructional and visceral, “Don’t Be Nice” is cousin to classic spelling-bee doc “Spellbound” (2002) and “Rize” (2005), David LaChapelle’s plunge into the competitive culture of black street dance. With an intimate grain, the films profile the competitors, limn their struggles, backgrounds and singular strategies for clinching it. Coach Whitehead reminds her poets they must reconcile the political (Black Lives Matter provides a provocative backdrop) and the personal. “You have to be as curious about yourself as you are about the world,” she says. “The living experience is an archive and we can access it depending on how courageous we are.” Picking psychic scabs and tending larger social wounds proves grueling; tears and workshop walkouts offer raw drama. The film jolts the poems to life, turning some into stand-alone videos of the poets slamming in cluttered streets and crunched subways. We know where the show is going—the Nationals—so the film’s competitive resolution isn’t the whole point. Verbal and body language telling soul-stripping stories of sexual identity, black jubilation and the roaring rejection of white hegemony—that's where it’s really at.
In select theaters September 20th