Down at the ‘Corner’ Drugstore

At an obscure intersection just west of downtown Baltimore, a voice behind a TV camera greets a raggy, on-the-move drug addict who mutters a no-look reply without stopping or much noticing.

“Hey, waz up?”

So begins “The Corner.” And waz up is more landmark work from HBO, this time a striking six-week miniseries delivering one of the rawest, truest, most provocative and involving dramas ever beamed to Americans. And one of the most important, defining a seedy, destructive junkie subculture in vivid, aching detail in the tradition of such theatrical films as “Panic in Needle Park,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Trainspotting.”

Junkiedom has never been less glamorous.

While some equate bold, edgy TV with last Sunday’s stagnant live remaking of the movie “Fail Safe” on CBS, it’s HBO that’s been taking behemoth creative risks with the likes of “The Larry Sanders Show,” “The Sopranos” and, now, its latest distinctive project whose tortured characters and hints of fragile hope linger long after the final credits.

“The Corner” spans a year in the drug-immersed lives of Gary McCullough (T.K. Carter), Fran Boyd (Khandi Alexander) and their teenage son, DeAndre (Sean Nelson), as well as other snorters, shooters, speedballers and low-level dealers in this teeming underclass whose heroin and cocaine sellers occupy and move their merchandise from street corners like merchants in a bazaar.

It’s a neighborhood in steep decline, where a shrunken middle class is increasingly eclipsed by pervasive crime and narcotics. A baby is born on Thanksgiving. But to what? The pavement is such a gridlock of drug activity that dealers are asked to suspend selling for a few moments so a recreation director can pass with her human chain of adorable little kiddies trailing behind her. What lies ahead for them? One day, will they be on a corner?

Drawn from a nonfiction book by David Simon and Edward Burns, these African American characters and their stories are real, and the wonderful cast depicting them across six hours is so piercingly on target and natural that you’re unaware of actors acting. But are they ever, led by the amazing Nelson and Alexander, whose tragic and wickedly funny Fran has you laughing and choking with emotion almost simultaneously.

Shot cinema verite-style mostly with a fluid hand-held camera, “The Corner” is superbly directed by actor Charles S. Dutton (“Roc”) from an excellent script by Simon (“Homicide: Life on the Street”) and David Mills (“ER” and “NYPD Blue”).

Each episode begins and ends with Dutton tossing out questions from behind the camera to Gary, Fran, DeAndre and others. In between, despite glints of optimism and injections of humor, the story is very troubling, and for much of the first episode you’re appalled.

Yet, without apologizing for these mangled lives or suggesting this anguish is not self-imposed, “The Corner” gradually rubs off the grime hiding its characters’ humanity. Despite the pain they inflict on themselves and others, pulling for them becomes easy as they battle their demons and struggle to regain control of their lives, laboriously climbing from one pothole on tenuous baby legs only to fall into another and another. For some, detox becomes the hallowed shrine. Yet triumphs here are so fragmentary and delicate that you’re constantly on edge, wondering when each house of cards will collapse.

As we meet once upwardly mobile Gary and Fran--profiled in separate episodes--they are divorced from each other and wed to drugs.

Before the needle brought him down, Gary spent a year at Ohio State University, ran a business and was an investment whiz with a portfolio worth six figures. Body sagging, eyes projecting sadness and urgency, he now spends his life shooting dope with his predatory girlfriend, Ronnie (Tasha Smith), and begging from friends and committing petty crimes for a few bucks to finance his habit.

Once a fashionable party animal, Fran is now a thick-lidded crackhead who smokes Newports bummed from others and drinks beer on the stoop of the crumbly row house she shares with DeAndre and her younger son, and with her sister and a brother. The adults snort and shoot up there together. Desperate for cash, Fran is a shoplifter whose thieving has her banned from shopping malls.

Not yet 16, weed-smoking DeAndre, or Dre as he’s called, has been slinging drugs for nearly three years and is well known to cops who patrol the area and keep an eye on the corner where he and his friends do business. Within a year, he’ll be a father. Though in and out of school, he’s intelligent and a natural leader with a spark in his eyes, his dreadlocks giving him a softness belying the turbulence of the bleak drug culture swallowing him.

Many people here have good hearts, including that heroic recreation leader, Ella Thompson (Tyra Ferrell), and a slurred, fogged-up artist named Blue (Glenn Plummer), who notes with the knowledge of a lifetime: “Ain’t no job harder than bein’ a drug addict.”

Affirming that, this is a poisoned universe where drugs drive friends and family members to steal from each other, and where Fran in one breath admonishes DeAndre for dealing, and in the next asks to split his stash, drugs speaking louder to her than her inner voice as a mother.

An absence of dramatic flourishes and cheap sentiment makes “The Corner” all the more stunning. Sutton lets this saga evolve without juicing it. He makes his lens a voyeur, and some scenes are astonishing for how quietly and unemotionally they depict perversity.

One takes place in the “shooting gallery” of a drug house where Rita Hale (Robin Michelle McClamb), a woman with scabs and infected sores covering her body, routinely searches druggie pals for veins that haven’t burned out, almost tenderly sticking a needle in one man’s stomach, another’s neck.

Another shocking sequence begins with an endearing old addict-dealer named Fat Curt (Clarke Peters) collapsing on the street. Later he welcomes being shot up by Rita in his hospital room despite being told by a doctor that laying off drugs will give him more time. “Time for what?” a baffled fellow user asks, the concept of a future beyond drugs not on his radar screen.

Some in “The Corner” turn out to have limited futures. The story ends with a devastating update, followed by Dutton interviewing some of the real characters, who speak here about the missteps they’ve made. One of them is DeAndre, perhaps surprised that he’s still alive.

* “The Corner” can be seen Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO. It is rated TV-MA (mature audiences).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.