MOVIE REVIEW : A Romanticized Fantasia Goes for an Aimless ‘Drive’

The best thing about “New Jersey Drive” are the nighttime scenes of joy-riding Newark street toughs cruising and spinning up and down the boulevards in merry chaos. The cars, mostly stolen, are like creatures out of an urban night-world, and they’re both frightening and beautiful to watch.

Writer-director Nick Gomez, whose first film was the micro-budgeted “Laws of Gravity,” is entranced by the way these cars move, and he’s also drawn to the joy-riders. Jason (Sharron Corley) and his shaven-headed buddy Midget (Gabriel Casseus), like the other rootless black teen-agers whom we see, cruise through the movie. (They can break into a car in the time it takes to read this paragraph.) They’re always in motion, going in circles, and their dialogue has a street jive lilt.

Gomez finds all this hypnotic--and that’s the movie’s limitation as well as its strength. He tries to keep the finger-pointing to a minimum but the film is not nearly as evenhanded as its free-floating technique would indicate. Ultimately it’s a kind of apologia for these kids. It’s a tribute to their style .

The point may be that, when you have nothing else going on in your life, style is your salvation. We don’t get much beneath the style, though. There’s a sameness to the incidents in this movie--it’s like a tape loop of trouble.

Jason, who lives with his sister and mother and her boyfriend, narrates the movie, which flashes back from his entrance into a detention hall. He is portrayed as a good kid caught up in a bad scene; he’s emblematic of what urban despair can do to you. But Jason doesn’t really develop as a character, perhaps because the actor playing Jason--who was a member of a gang in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn--strikes too many attitudes. He poses tough, and so does Gabe Casseus as Midget, though he smiles more. As their lives spin more and more out of control, you can spot the warning flags a mile away.

When one of the boys says, “We were just trying to make our own mark in the world,” a note of special pleading comes into play. Since it is the (mostly) white racist cops in this movie who are the brutalizers--chief among them Saul Stein’s burly bad Roscoe--”New Jersey Drive” comes across as a soft-pedaling of urban crime. (Spike Lee was the executive producer.)

Despite the semi-documentary look and the up-from-the-streets banter, the film is just about as romanticized as “Rebel Without a Cause” or “The Wild One.” It’s a youth-in-trouble fantasia with a hip-hop beat, and it’s primed for audiences who want to enter into dangerous terrain without getting their shoes scuffed. The danger in this movie is a turn-on for audiences in the same way that it appears to be for Jason and Midget and the others, and there’s something a little disreputable about that.

* MPAA rating: R, for pervasive strong language and some violence, drugs and drinking. Times guidelines: It includes graphic punch-outs and gunplay.

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‘New Jersey Drive’

Sharron Corley: Jason Petty Gabriel Casseus: Midget Gwen McGee: Rene Petty Saul Stein: Roscoe A Gramercy release of a 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks production in association with the Shooting Gallery. Produced by Larry Meistrich, Bob Gosse. A New Line presentation. Director, screenwriter Nick Gomez. Executive producer Spike Lee. Cinematographer Adam Kimmel. Editor Tracy S. Granger. Music supervisor Dawn Soler. Production design Lester Cohen. Set decorator Lynn-Mariei Nigro. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

* In general release in Southern California.