Mo' Better Blues.

SPIKE LEE's intention with his new film, Mo' Better Blues, was to tell the life of a jazz musician accurately, not as seen in movies by white filmmakers. The sales pitch for the movie is that Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight and Clint Eastwood's Bird got it all wrong-too dark, too gloomy, too humorless, too patronizing. Now a black artist will tell it as-sorry, like it really was or, rather, is, since the time is a vague present. Unfortunately, what we get is mo' worse.

There was indeed much to criticize about those two movies. But are we to believe that it is the "white sensibility" that undercut them? However that may be, the corrective is not Mo' Better Blues, which has no more character development, no more originality of plot, and rather less, or less good, music than the two films Lee keeps badmouthing. It also has prettification of the jazz-club surroundings, ugly whiffs of anti-Semitism, and horribly formulaic story-telling to contend with. But yes, it does have more jazz musicianly humor-such as it is.

Let me confess that I know little about jazz, and that most of my information here comes from Lee's companion volume to the film, and from the review by Gary Giddins, The Village Voice's jazz and, more recently, movie critic. That Giddins's review, after listing numerous faults, is nevertheless a rave, strikes me as odd. For example, if Jewish club owners such as Max Gordon, Art D'Lugoff, and Barry Josephson were notably fair to black musicians, why should their film alter egos-ineptly called Moe and Josh Flatbush-be presented as bloodsuckers? And if a good many club owners were Italian (as the actors portraying the Flatbushes, John and Nicholas Turturro, are), why does Lee, in an interview with the New York Post, say that the majority were Jewish? Giddins notes such things, disapproves, and promptly forgets.

Conversely, no one in Mo' Better Blues does drugs. That's like making a movie about Scotland without a kilt in it; or, more precisely, about a string quartet without showing a viola. The two jazz clubs depicted are speciously spacious and attractive; one of them is Art Deco and called Beneath the Underdog; that is the title of Charlie Mingus's autobiography, but hardly an alluring name for a club. Although the film's protagonist, Bleek Gilliam, trumpeter and leader of a quintet, complains, "I'm sick and tired of playing before everybody but my own people," the film keeps showing largely black audiences at both the Dog" and, later, the Dizzy Club. "Why did Lee write a movie about a trumpet player," Giddins asks, "when he obviously idolizes Coltrane, and allows saxophones to dominate the soundtrack?" He goes on to decry the inappropriateness of an opening theme for strings, a sequence of church chords, a parody of radio-play music, but quickly forgives all.

Most of the music is by Bill Lee, Spike's father, in a case of inverse nepotism, for most of it is lackluster. The big number, performed at the Dizzy, "Harlem Blues," has good words by W. C. Handy, and pallid music by Raymond Jones. The montage near the end, showing Bleek's marriage, fatherhood, and redemption, and lasting, as Spike tells us, seven minutes and 46 seconds "because that's the length of Love Supreme,' the monumental jazz recording of John Coltrane," which plays "over, underneath, and with" it, covers eight years. The music is bebop all right, but to my ears no more impressive than the

montage itself, which is reminiscent in style of the commercials Lee has been making for TV.

But what is truly awful about the movie is its maniacal parallelism and circularity, arbitrary bits of heavy handed symmetry Spike keeps imposing over and over again, more like elementary geometry than enlightened filmmaking.

Mo' Better Blues ("mo' better," like "the nasty" or boning," is a jive synonym for the sex act) is the story of Bleek Gilliam, a brilliant trumpeter whose motto is "My music! Everything else is secondary." He rules his band with a fist of iron, although Shadow, his gifted sax player, is becoming more and more rebellious, and Left Hand Lacey, his pianist, is a dandy who carries on with white women and is (because of that?) always late for rehearsal. Bleek conducts simultaneous affairs with Clarke Bentancourt, a record-store cashier with aspirations to be a singer, and Indigo (no last name given), a grade-school teacher. His loyalty is greater to the band's runty manager, the self-styled Giant Spike himself), who is both incompetent at getting good contracts from the club owners and a compulsive gambler, always in debt, with the musicians having to bail him out. But having been friends with him since third grade, Bleek won't fire him.

There is also Big Stop, Bleek's worldly-wise father, full of good advice; Butterbean, the comic at the club, who may be funny, but, as the late Robin Harris plays him, would require subtitles to prove it; and Petey, the Hispanic bookie to whom Giant keeps losing and whose black goons, assuring Giant that they would not kill a black brother, merely keep breaking his various bones (a less fun type of boning) and thoughtfully dropping him off at the hospital.

Meanwhile Shadow is preparing to leave Bleek and start his own group; knowing that Gilliam is two-timing Clarke and refusing to let her sing, he tries to muscle in, with promises to make her his vocalist and his lover. With flat-footed symmetry, Bleek is shown in successive bedroom scenes, first calling Clarke Indigo, then Indigo, Clarke. Next, the women show up at Beneath the Underdog wearing the same red dress that Bleek, symmetrically, bought them. Then, symmetrically, both women leave him, and soon Shadow is boning Clarke. In further symmetrical scenes, Bleek's phone calls and pleas on the tape remain unanswered. The sex scenes, by the way, are neither artistic nor erotic.

Finally, Giant is beaten to a pulp in the back alley behind the club by the aforementioned couple of thugs; Bleek comes, somewhat belatedly, to his defense, and is repeatedly punched in his vulnerable and invaluable lips as teeth fly from his mouth. Then he is clobbered with his own horn. He is comforted at the hospital by his philosophical ex-baseball-player father, but both of them know he'll never play again. (Big Stop, incidentally, says he is 75, whereas Bleek is still in his twenties, which doesn't make sense.)

One year and much agonizing later, Bleek, his lips partly restored, seeks out the Dizzy Club, where the Shadow Henderson Quartet-all of Bleek's former band, plus Clarke as vocalist-now plays. It is a night of dismal, cliched rain, but he is warmly received by the doorman: Giant, now with a gimpy leg, but without the gambling habit. Shadow asks Bleek to play, Clarke even kisses him, but he only makes a fool of himself and rushes out amid a burst of silent consternation and commiseration.

He seeks out Indigo, who tries to fend him off, but ends up marrying him, with Shadow, Clarke, and the band at the wedding. The Gilliams have a son, Miles, who turns eight and is being taught the trumpet by his father, now a music teacher. And here the parallel structure becomes atrocious. The film began with Bleek, age eight, practicing his trumpet as his little friends call to him from below his window to come out and frolic. His mother, overruling his father, forbids it until he finishes practicing. Now the exact same scene, with the exact same dialogue, recurs, except that Bleek prevails over Indigo, and the proud parents watch from the window as an elated Miles dashes off to play baseball. We even get the same crane shot of Brooklyn treetops and brownstones at start and finish: Lee is very proud of his Louma crane, which he keeps using as well as extolling in the book of the film.

The dialogue creaks along most of the time. Who, for instance, would say, as Clarke does, "If your music is the be all to end all as you state, to ensure that [increased earnings], you better get rid of Giant as your manager"? To which Bleek responds, Why are you bringing all this confusion into my home?" Or take this, from Giant to Left Hand arriving late: "If your late ass woulda been here you woulda missed nada." And, by way of wit, "Your mom's so old she has powdered milk coming out of her titties," which cracks up the band. This is evidently that easy banter that Lee so sorely misses in Bird and Round Midnight.

But, to do Spike Lee justice, there are a few-a very few-good scenes in the film, although they concern neither jazz nor the band spirit. They are bits of conversation Bleek and Big Stop (played by Dick Anthony Williams) share while playing catch, and one rather irrelevant scene in which Shadow asks Giant to help him determine whether his girlfriend will be able to smell another woman's perfume on his sheets. Here, as the two men sniff away and Shadow tells anecdotes about his woman's jealousy, there is some wild, quirky fun. But about a jazz player's love for his trumpet you can find out much more from a Forties novel, Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn (but not from its 1951 movie adaptation). True, Miss Baker was white, and so was Bix Beiderbecke, on whom her hero was modeled.

Ernest Dickerson's cinematography is up to snuff, but by no means outstanding. Denzel Washington, an excellent actor, doesn't find his bearings as Bleek, and mostly looks-you guessed it-bleak. But all the other men are fine, especially Wesley Snipes, as Shadow, and Gianearlo Esposito, as Left Hand. The women, however, can't act. Joie Lee, as Indigo, whom her brother's screenplay describes as "a very beautiful sister," can act a bit. But sister sister comes across as preposterous with her long, thin face topped by a hairdo that looks like an upside-down broom cast in bronze. The main problem, though, is that Lee needs controversy to score. She's Gotta Have It and, especially, Do the Right Thing had it; in Mo' Better Blues, there's nothing for him to be controversial, or blow his horn, about.