His new beat: acting

When did hip-hop rebels finally phone for the moving vans to come and haul their turntables and BlackBerries to the most nonthreatening districts of American culture? Maybe it was as far back as MC Hammer and his 1980s Saturday morning cartoon, or perhaps it was around the time of that surreal McDonald’s ad featuring an Eminem sound-alike. It could have been as recently as two weeks ago, when the rapper Ludacris, ensconced in the towering finery of the Four Seasons Hotel, looked out over Hollywood and said he aspired to add his own chapter to its storied history of rappers as serious film actors.

“It’s an old-school thing to have a rapper in a movie,” Ludacris said, and while some in Hollywood may think the Barrymores were old school, the young rhymer does have a point: It has been 14 years since the scowling Ice Cube marched into film as Doughboy, the murderous thug of “Boyz N the Hood,” a bellwether moment for the rapper-as-actor approach.

Cube, Snoop Dogg, LL Cool J, the late Tupac Shakur and Ice-T are among the most notable names in the hip-hop wing of the Screen Actors Guild, and the list grows longer every season. Chris “Ludacris” Bridges made his big-screen presence known in “2 Fast 2 Furious” and now has two new movies: “Hustle & Flow,” which opens July 13 and has rapping at its core, and “Crash,” which opened Friday. “Crash” looks to be one of the most dissected and disputed movies of the year with its harsh mapping of Los Angeles as a metropolis festering with racism.

“What attracted me to the script was the way the movie jumps from scenarios and different characters and how the pieces come together at the end,” said the rapper. “And then when I heard the different people attached, I said I have to be part of this because I think it’s going to do a lot for me as an up-and-coming guy. I learned a lot just being around the people.”

“The people” include Sandra Bullock as the embittered wife of the city’s district attorney, who is portrayed by Brendan Fraser. There are also two police officers, the rage-filled Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon) and Det. Graham (Don Cheadle), who casually chides his girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito) for daring to correct him when he calls her a Mexican. (Her heritage is Puerto Rican and Salvadoran, and he wonders who “gathered all those remarkably different cultures together and taught them all to park their cars on their lawns.”)

The other figures who drive through the dysfunctional city include a Latino locksmith who still bears the tattoos of a vato youth, a Persian storekeeper pushed into a corner by his travails and prejudices, and an African American television producer struggling to reconcile the racial definitions of the modern day.

The movie’s title refers to a car collision that begins to link the story lines of these suspicious and Balkanized Angelenos, but the film is really one big demolition derby of pain and prejudice.

‘RAP PREPARED ME FOR THIS’

PRODUCER Cathy Schulman has called Ludacris “the great, great discovery of this movie.” For Ludacris, the character was rediscovering people he saw during his youth in Atlanta.

“This is a character who is smart, but he also has just learned not to trust anyone and not to do anything that does not benefit himself on the spot,” he said. “He does bad, y’know, and that’s happening out there.”

Ludacris’ character moves through the film with natural ease, some clever nuance and the physical hitches of a street kid who hops through the world like a needle on vinyl.

“What I did in rap prepared me for this, and this movie has prepared me to do more things after this,” the 28-year-old said.

To Ludacris, a rapper’s flow is a mix of the logical and the intuitive; to be truly successful the rhymer has to get out of his brain and stay in it at the same time. “And you got to be able to do your thing with a bunch of people staring dead at you waiting for something to happen. That all gets you ready to be an actor.” Scripts and rap lyrics may start on paper, but the performance is what happens between the beats. “There’s a real good comparison there. That’s why rappers have been doing all right in movies. But I still think they have something to prove.”

Ludacris has nothing to prove in the music scene. He is one of the avatars of the Dirty South, which has become a sensation in recent years by adding Atlanta and other Southern hubs to the always geographically minded scene of big-time rap. His latest album, “The Red Light District,” dropped in December and has sold 1.6 million copies, adding to his previous platinum performance with “Chicken-N-Beer” in 2003.

To rap fans, he is known for his versatile studio work and witty persona as Southern Lothario, but his name popped up on a wider scene when Bill O’Reilly turned his talk-show sights on the marketing deal Ludacris secured with Pepsi. The spokesman role was fleeting; the soda giant backed out of the deal after the commentator stirred up a debate over whether a rapper with a ribald body of work had the image befitting an iconic corporate name.

Pepsi, though, was just keeping with the times; this is the era, after all, that has seen Snoop Dogg go from a gangsta rapper once charged in connection with a murder and a pot-smoker of Marleyesque devotion to a supremely successful stock character in modern American farce. Snoop’s performance in “Starsky & Hutch,” in fact, was on the television in Ludacris’ room at the Four Seasons.

“Yeah, that’s funny stuff,” Ludacris said, nodding toward the gangly West Coast rapper playing for broad laughs in a golf course scene. “I’m looking for something different, though.”

EXPECTATIONS FLIPPED AROUND

In “Crash,” Ludacris plays Anthony, a young street tough who is first seen in the film with his friend Cameron (Terrence Howard) walking along a sidewalk in an affluent white neighborhood shopping district. Anthony is bitterly mocking modern society, class inequities and their surroundings. He is disgusted by the way white couples seem to be stiffening with dread at the sight of his cornrows and scowl. “We’re the ones who should be afraid,” he says -- just before he and his buddy carjack the city’s district attorney and his wife.

The scene is a calculated to flip expectations and political correctness in the face of the viewer, and the film’s adherence to the harshest of interactions has drawn strongly mixed reviews. Some critics view it as bold, others as flimsy in its manipulation. The film was directed and co-written by Canadian-born Paul Haggis, the screenwriter of “Million Dollar Baby,” and it’s easy to imagine that the carjacking scene was informed by the 1991 gunpoint robbery of his own car.

“It’s meant to be provocative. These characters are symbolic and meant to stir up our thoughts about the very strange times we live in,” Haggis said.

The film has a sprawl to it that has become shorthand for Southern California in recent American film. Like “Short Cuts,” “Magnolia” and “Grand Canyon,” “Crash” presents a gallery of damaged people whose lives intersect and collide amid the moral smog and disconnected freeways of the metropolis.

“There are similarities, absolutely, and this is an approach to this place where we live, where people’s entire lives can share space in the city but be completely different and kept apart by the freeway exits they never take and barriers put up between them,” Haggis said.

Haggis, 52, and Cheadle (also a producer on the film) were among the small circle who auditioned Ludacris for his role as the deep-voiced and casually violent Anthony. The reading was at Haggis’ home (which also appears in the film as the district attorney’s residence), and Ludacris said he was nervous but eager to walk a new tightrope. Haggis said Ludacris brought an invaluable commodity to his role.

“Authenticity, the street,” Haggis said. “He brought it, and he used it to make that character come to life in a way that the audience has to have mixed feelings about him, even with the things he does.”

The audience may or may not have the same type of reaction to “Crash.” Ludacris, with Snoop on the box and Los Angeles spread out before him out the window, smiled and laughed. “Yeah, this is a movie that is going to shake some people up, and that’s good. And it’s a movie that’s going to help prove rappers can act, y’know?”