John Singleton Did Justice to a Poetic Vision of African-American Life

“Boyz N the Hood” rests in American movie history like a boulder in a riverbed, altering the direction of the stream. After its release in the summer of 1991, everything looked different, including its precursors. “Mean Streets,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” the Blaxploitation spectacles of the 1970s, the socially conscious crime dramas of the 1930s, classic westerns and samurai epics — somehow John Singleton, a very recent graduate of the University of Southern California film school, synthesized all of those models even as he came up with something bracingly, thrillingly and frighteningly new.

“Boyz” made him the youngest person — and the first African-American — nominated for a best directing Academy Award. In the annals of cinema, there aren’t many first features to match it for ambition and impact (“Citizen Kane”? “Breathless”?), and its influence on what came after is hard to overstate. Singleton, who died Monday at 51, filled his characters’ lives with warmth and humor even as they were constantly menaced, and often destroyed, by violence. He infused familiar coming-of-age and gangster-movie tropes with a rare authenticity. This wasn’t just a matter of his intimate knowledge of the setting known then as South-Central Los Angeles, but also of his brave, even brazen confidence in himself and his audience.

A blazing debut can be a hard act to follow, and Singleton’s second film, “Poetic Justice” (1993), didn’t enjoy the same success, at least with critics, as its predecessor. But when I heard the news of Singleton’s passing, “Poetic Justice” was the movie I found myself thinking about. Partly because its earnest sentiments — its openheartedness about creativity, love and loss — seemed most apt for mourning an artist who left too soon. Grief, after all, has been part of the film’s legacy since its male star, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1996. And there may be no purer dose of early-’90s nostalgia than watching Shakur and Janet Jackson travel the romantic-comedy arc, their progress from conflict to harmony punctuated by the poems of Maya Angelou and breathtaking vistas of the California countryside.

“Poetic Justice” is, in its way, as influential as “Boyz N the Hood” and as political as “Higher Learning” and “Rosewood,” Singleton’s subsequent confrontations with past and present-day manifestations of American racism. “Poetic Justice” begins with a sly and pointed critique of Hollywood representation. A note tells us we’re in South-Central, but the images are of high-rise, well-heeled Manhattan, where a white couple, played by Billy Zane and Lori Petty, are drinking wine in a penthouse.

The joke is that this is a movie-within-the-movie showing at a Los Angeles drive-in. (The marquee tells us that it’s called “Deadly Diva” and has an NC-17 rating.) The patrons, including Jackson’s Justice and her boyfriend (Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest), don’t look like the people on screen, but they’ve bought tickets anyway, as generations of black and Latinx moviegoers have before them. With a few exceptions, it’s always been that way.

“Poetic Justice” sets out to change that situation, by every means available. The stylized, consequence-free gunplay of “Deadly Diva” is soon drowned out by a shooting that pulls what seemed like an ’80s-vintage teen comedy into the brutal world of “Boyz N the Hood.” Within a few minutes, before the opening titles have even scrolled, we’ve swerved from satire to sex farce to tragedy, and Singleton is only getting started.

Eventually, Justice and Lucky (Shakur’s character) will set off for Oakland in a Postal Service truck with their friends Iesha (Regina King) and Chicago (Joe Torry), and “Poetic Justice” will turn into a road movie. Before their departure, Singleton lingers over the funny and painful details of their lives at home and at work, sketching a portrait of working-class black life that looks back to the radical neorealism of the LA Rebellion and forward to the businesslike striving of the “Barbershop” franchise. The casting of two stars of popular music as a hairdresser (Jackson) and a mailman (Shakur) doesn’t so much glamorize the characters as affirm the realness that the performers had already established as the cornerstone of their appeal.

Between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, the four travelers journey through a kind of utopian space. Not that everything is harmonious among them. Iesha and Chicago have some issues, and Lucky and Justice are barely on speaking terms. Harsh words are exchanged, followed by a few slaps and punches. But the movie’s close attention to this interpersonal friction might cause you to notice what isn’t in the picture. There are no police on the highway and almost no white people (except for a belligerent truck driver at a gas station). Justice and company crash a family reunion, where Maya Angelou herself dispenses wisdom and passes judgment on her temporary nieces and nephews. They stop at a cultural festival where revolutionary poets and drummers hold the stage.

This dream evaporates in Oakland, where a shooting has claimed the life of Lucky’s cousin and rap partner. The point of the film’s long, languorous middle was never to imagine an escape from violence and racism, but to show some of the richness and variety of life in their shadows, to free the characters from the obligation to behave like symbols or avatars of social problems.

Watching “Poetic Justice” now, I was put in mind of Barry Jenkins’ recent “If Beale Street Could Talk,” and not only because Regina King is (splendidly) in both films. Their visual and storytelling styles are very different, but Jenkins and Singleton are directors whose primary motivation is their unstinting love for the people they conjure into being.

They push aside the noise of plot to capture the quiet intensity of ordinary moments and the poetry of everyday experience. They notice beauty everywhere. “Beale Street” and “Poetic Justice” are stories of black artists falling in love in a world that tends to devalue both their creativity and their feelings, and each movie simultaneously illuminates those struggles and shares in them, in a spirit that is sorrowful but never grim or despairing.

My point isn’t to establish a lineage, but to identify a common spirit, and to measure the shape and size of the doorway that Singleton made, an opening wide enough for so many others to walk through.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.