Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is a tale of a legendary music mogul, a high-wire business deal, a kidnapping, a ransom demand for $17.5 million in Swiss francs, an ethical conundrum and a police pursuit through the New York subway. Yet, as is often the case with Lee, there are diversions and distractions amid the drama, intriguing and unexpected decisions that throw aspects of the narrative into sharp relief.
The film begins in New York as the day is dawning. The camera floats and glides through the skies and around the towers to the strains of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ before coming to rest on the apex of a striking high-rise apartment block. The building looks like a staircase, a design that emphasises the exclusive, rarefied position of the penthouse. At the top in every way, literally and metaphorically, a man is standing on the balcony discussing a deal.
This is Denzel Washington as David King, founder of a music label called Stackin’ Hits. He was all set to sell his share of the business but has changed his mind at the last minute and instead plans to borrow the money to take it over himself. It’s a risky move, and it could leave him dangerously exposed. But what is life without risk? “It’s a beautiful day,” he says, as he finishes the call. He will soon, discover, however that everything has changed.
That song — the exuberant opening number from Oklahoma! — is a characteristic Lee choice, emphatic, unexpected and layered with meaning. Its lyrics are blithe and optimistic, but the rural references are cheerfully at odds with the location. In addition, Lee has chosen the version sung by baritone Norm Lewis, the first black performer to play the lead in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. (Lewis also appeared in Lee’s 2020 Da 5 Bloods.)
Music has had an important role in Lee’s work, from central subject matter to glancing reference to inspired needle drop. Beyond the position of its central character as a prominent music industry figure famous for “the best ears in the business,” the score, soundtrack and diegetic music also play a significant part in setting the tone and creating the world of Highest 2 Lowest.
On the day he decides to stay in the game and take his music company back, King is blindsided. He gets a call to tell him that his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped. The ransom demand is for $17.5 million. The police are called, but within a short time it becomes clear that there has been a mistake: the kidnapping victim is not Trey but Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King’s closest and oldest friend Paul (Jeffrey Wright), who works as his driver. The kidnapper insists he still wants the ransom. With his finances in jeopardy, what will King do now?
Highest 2 Lowest explores its main character’s evolving relationship with his circumstances, and the film’s tone shifts accordingly. For the first hour, much of the action takes place in the penthouse, where dilemmas both financial and moral are thrashed out with varying degrees of plausibility. It becomes a tense thriller. It is also a study of friendship under pressure.
For Denzel Washington, it is an opportunity to flesh out a figure of authority, charm, certainty and vulnerability with all the force and mercurial energy he has at his disposal. Alongside him, Jeffrey Wright gives a restrained, carefully judged performance as his friend Paul, who grew up with him but took a different path.
The opening credits acknowledge that Highest 2 Lowest was inspired by King’s Ransom, a 1959 police procedural by Ed McBain that was the basis for Akira Kurosawa’s remarkable 1963 drama, High and Low. Kurosawa cast his most celebrated actor and long-time collaborator, Toshiro Mifune, in the lead role; Lee is making his fifth feature with Washington, almost twenty years since their last film together.
Working with a screenplay by Alan Fox, Lee makes some significant departures from these sources. McBain’s novel is a procedural, and in High and Low Kurosawa spends a good deal of time on the painstaking police investigation and the gripping surveillance and pursuit that follows. Mifune’s character consequently disappears for a good part of the film.
Highest 2 Lowest is quite different. King remains central throughout, with the police given a peripheral role. They are deferential towards King, the man of means, but immediately treat Paul is a suspect: a white detective is particularly aggressive towards him. And although they make concerted attempts to track the kidnapper and retrieve the ransom, they are basically ineffectual. It’s up to the two friends to do the work.
The music in Highest 2 Lowest comes hard at the audience. Composer Howard Drossin has worked as an arranger and orchestrator on several of Lee’s films, beginning in 2002 with 25th Hour, but this is his first score for him. It works in an insistent, often overblown fashion at the beginning of the film but shifts in keeping with the drama. James Brown provides the soundtrack to the friends’ quest; a rap track is a clue — first to the audience, when we are given a fleeting glimpse of Kyle in the kidnapper’s clutches, and then to King, who realises where it might lead him. Rapper A$AP Rocky (credited in the film as A$AP Rocky aka Rakim Mayers) plays a significant role in the final stages of the movie.
Sometimes, however, Highest 2 Lowest simply succumbs to pleasure. There’s a scene in which a frantic police chase is halted when a celebration for National Puerto Rican Day brings the area to a standstill; rather than treating the event purely as an obstacle or a source of tension, Lee savours the moment, giving the audience time to enjoy legendary salsa musician Eddie Palmieri and his orchestra entertaining the crowd.
When it comes to portraying King’s relationship with music, Highest 2 Lowest works hard to establish his reputation and its effect on others. His best years seem to be behind him; this is almost a running joke in the film. He rails against AI, which his business partner tells him is the future, but his wife Pam (Ilfanesh Hadera) notes that he has lost interest in the music itself and seems more exercised by the internet and business side of things. When he’s finally galvanised to resist the buyout, his first thought is preservation. He worries the new owners will drop new signings and cannibalise the catalogue. “Do they care about the legacy?” he asks. “They’ll squeeze out every drop of black culture and artistic integrity I spent the past twenty-five years of my life trying to build.”
King’s own home speaks to the notion of black culture in a very particular fashion. The walls are bristling with the work of black visual artists and their subjects, some of which comes from Spike Lee’s own collection. There are two works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, both with musical resonances: one, in the shape of a vinyl record, is a homage to Charlie Parker, the other a painting dedicated to Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. There is a Gordon Parks photograph of Malcolm X, pieces from a Warhol series on Muhammad Ali, portraits of Jackie Robinson and Toni Morrison.
The artworks are filmed in a way that emphasises their presence in the film. It’s not simply display: there’s a weight to them, to the figures they represent and invoke (although the Basquiats are also valuable enough to be mentioned in the dialogue, cited as assets along with King’s real estate holdings and stocks and bonds).
So, after everything plays out, where does Highest 2 Lowest leave us? In a somewhat upbeat place, it turns out. King, the man with “the best ears in the business,” has put them to good use in a new way, and his commitment to music is reignited. Lee seems to attach a good deal of significance to the song and performance that conclude the film, and its implications for the future of King and those close to him. There are intriguing resonances with its location, back at the penthouse, where it all started, albeit with a shift in tone.
In the course of the film, one of King’s maxims, “Attention is the only true currency nowadays,” is quoted back to him twice in ways that he can’t have expected. Questions have arisen during Highest 2 Lowest about the world of culture and consumption, about social media, parasocial relationships, expectations and desires that are fostered and exploited in the fame economy that he has been part of. These questions are left hanging, perhaps inevitably, left for us to ponder. But for King, a low-key high is the prevailing mood. •
