Rachel Samuels’s Dark Streets may only be a quasi-noir and quasi-musical, but that doesn’t stop it from being a wholesale slog. A tribute to 1930s music and style, Rachel Stevens’s film (adapted by Wallace King from Glenn M. Stewart’s play) is a thing of visual and narrative smudginess, its belligerently expressionistic, lush cinematography typified by awful fuzziness around the frame’s edges, and its story an undercooked murder-mystery composed of half-scenes and conversational fragments. Whether it’s the faux-lyrical narration delivered by raspy-voiced, mohawked performer Prince (Toledo), the wan expressions of boozy nightclub owner protagonist Chaz Davenport (Gabriel Mann), or the portentous and/or saucy bon mots falling out of everyone else’s inane mouths, Stevens’s saga is a risible muddle devoid of depth, originality and soul. This last quality is the one most aggressively sought, mainly via a bevy of blues tunes that attempts to augment the plot proper with a measure of forlorn, doomed romanticism. However, despite original compositions performed by Etta James, Natalie Cole, Dr. John and Chaka Khan (among others), Dark Streets never even flirts with a memorable tune or an accompanying bit of scintillating choreography, instead relying on sandpaper-subtle visual contrasts (warm lighting, spooky shadows) and pretentious blather—most from Prince, who’s fond of proclamations like “The meek don’t inherit the earth. They just end up in it”—to convey a stock mood of despair, longing and impending tragedy. Further muddying the waters is dreamlike logic in which people magically appear and disappear at random, and in which a character like Elias Koteas’s pale police lieutenant can walk around in a leather-straps-and-buckles body harness and arm sheaths, looking like some lost reject from Dark City, and not provoke a single double-take. It’s a fate this unattractive, empty film also merits.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
