Clockers

Spike Lee pays particular attention to the opening titles of his movies: They reflect his approach to the material. Never has that been more true than with the first shots in "Clockers," which show photos of young blacks, violently murdered. Sprawled on the pavement, their blood staining the concrete, they seem to have been halted in mid-flight, astonished by the fact of sudden death.

These grisly photographs set up a story that deals, essentially, with black-on-black crime. The film's hero is a white cop named Rocco Klein, played by Harvey Keitel, but "hero" is too strong a word: He is a weary professional who acts as a witness to death. There is a tendency in his business not to linger too long over the death of one young drug dealer, but he cannot get stubborn questions out of his mind. The protagonist, named Strike (Mekhi Phifer), is a young man who is not heroic but not evil, either: He is weighed down by the terrible burden of being trapped in a world of drugs and crime and not liking it there.

The movie takes place mostly in and around a New York housing project where Strike and his friends work as "clockers" - the lowest link in the drug supply chain. They work "around the clock" from benches and street corners, selling small packages to young white men who somehow know where to come to buy them.

The clockers live in a symbiotic relationship with narcotics cops; it's as if they depend on each other to define their roles. In an early scene, the cops strip-search the clockers on the street, and we realize that if it is demeaning to be strip-searched, it is equally demeaning to be the searcher.

The clockers work for Rodney (Delroy Lindo), a supplier who cruises the streets in a silent black car and seduces young men with words that give them status. "You're my son," he tells Strike. "My sword and staff." He predicts a big future for him. And he gives him a job. Another young black man, named Darryl Adams, has banished clockers from Ahab's, the fast-food outlet he manages. If Strike will kill Darryl, Rodney promises, he can get "off the benches" and move up in the organization.

Darryl is shot. How and why he is shot, and by whom, are the questions at the core of "Clockers," which is essentially a "police procedural," as crime fiction fans would call it. Richard Price, who wrote the original novel and co-wrote the screenplay with Lee, is less concerned with the solution, however, than with the way the answer to the mystery illuminates the lives of the characters. How do you shoot someone you hardly know? Lee, a born filmmaker, moves among the points of view. There is Strike, fearful and harassed, desperately unhappy to be selling drugs; he wants to move up in Rodney's circle not so much to advance as to get away from the relentless street life. There is Victor (Isaiah Washington), his brother, a good man who works two jobs to support his family but is exhausted and strung out, discouraged that the clockers make much more money than he can.

On the other side there is Rocco, a cop whose strongest motivation is not truth, not justice, but stubborn curiosity. And his partner Larry (John Turturro), who is in his own way a clocker, too.

Some of the movie's most harrowing scenes show cops hardened by a beat where drugs and death are the daily routine. The scene where they examine Darryl Adams' dead body is chilling in its casual detachment: They joke to separate themselves from the finality of death. In a society set up around drugs and guns, it is impossible to care about every single life that is lost; the system is diseased, and one can only hope (as Strike does) not to die from it.