‘Highest 2 Lowest’ and ‘Sinners’: a Lesson in Cinematic Music
Spoiler Warning for Highest 2 Lowest (2025) and Sinners (2025)
My first film production professor in college for Narrative Filmmaking was an ancient, grumpy man who didn’t seem to actually like any movies. It was a mystery why he chose this career. He would discuss formal choices he thought were effective and would sometimes nod and go “Mmhmm,” a privileged and generous gesture akin to a gold star or Academy Award, but would also always find some devastating flaw. There was minimal prompting in his assignments outside of single-word ideas meant to incite creativity, and fittingly, he had few rules regarding form or narrative. There was only one unbreakable commandment: no music of any kind was allowed. The worst kind was pop music, while diegetic (sound within the diegesis, or world of the film) music was sometimes acceptable. He was old enough to believe that sound technology had set the cinematic art form back a decade, and music, in his opinion, always inevitably becomes a crutch.
On the other hand, another film professor at NYU, lauded director Spike Lee, disagrees. Lee himself has used music to create iconic scenes ranging from Fight the Power (Public Enemy) blaring out of a radio in Do the Right Thing (1989) to the classical Hollywood musical number Straight and Nappy in School Daze (1988). He often uses music as a symbol of specific cultural moments, tying his stories to the world in which they were created, but also tends to lavish his scenes with orchestral scores. His latest directorial feature, Highest 2 Lowest, represents the music industry directly through David King (5-time Lee collaborator Denzel Washington), a music industry executive caught up in a ransom scheme; Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), King’s chauffeur and lifelong best friend, whose son was kidnapped instead of King’s own; and wannabe rapper-turned-kidnapper Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky). A remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), its critique of “early-stage capitalism in Japan” was adapted into one of “late-stage capitalism in America” by screenwriter Alan Fox.
Aside from a script lacking the nuance of the original, much of the film suffers from Lee’s tendency to overwhelm otherwise compelling scenes with a ‘50s melodrama score by Howard Drossin. King faces a search for his passion for music, but the film itself uses its score like sauce on overcooked meat as if to make up for the slow, Kurosawa-like first half. There’s a woefully missed opportunity of a scene in which King is greeted, apparently not for the first time, by a singer-songwriter looking for a break in his lobby. He waits and listens to the song, but then the music becomes non-diegetic and is just used to transition to the next scene—we never find out what happened to her. Most of the film isn’t quite thematically sound or formally inventive and is rather a disappointment as Lee’s first film in five years.
There is one sequence, however, which invigorates the film and demands rewatches. At the midpoint, King enters the 4 train to the Bronx right before a Yankees game to drop off the ransom while Dean Winters’s cop character chases a moped in a car through the Puerto Rican Day Parade. The first sign that this is something special is the use of film cinematography combined with digital in the train station. Lee is about to show us that he’s still got it. Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos present legendary New York musician Eddie Palmieri (who passed away last month at 88, RIP) to have the time of his life scoring the frenzied sequence. The scene is intense, cutting quickly between chanting Yankee fans stuck on a train and parade-goers with no regard for police sirens. The music here is diegetic and purposeful and evokes NYC chaos and rich culture.
I recalled at this point my professor’s interrogations—why was this music here? What does it do for the scene and the piece as a whole? In this case, Palmieri’s chaotic keyboard on top of Puerto Rican parade music on top of “Boston Sucks” provides context to the scene and to the world of the film. This is the first time we’ve seen King interacting with the city he presides over, the place that birthed him and his wealth. He loses the agency that he commands in his offices and penthouse and is thrust into a vivacious, chaotic soup of cultural symbols and sounds.
Earlier this year, we saw another vibrant midpoint musical scene in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. That scene was structured quite differently. The first half of the film was a gradual build-up to this climax, a celebration of the culture and people it represents. Instead of quick cuts, it uses a long unbroken tracking shot bookended by slowly creeping margins to create its own section of the film, a fleeting magical escape from the life of the plantation. The image ceases to subjectify its characters or even its society and becomes about a much deeper idea of music as a generational thread. The scene is still chaotic but just as carefully crafted; we see cultural symbols, both contemporary and ancient, expanding the community of the juke joint through time and space.
Both these sequences use music to expand the diegesis, to connect the world of the film to ours, and to deepen the text. They are both tours de force in pacing and sound design, but they’re especially crucial because of the way they broaden the aperture of their films by using iconography and layered soundscapes. My professor would always argue that music’s ability to emotionally manipulate makes it a blunt instrument and a lazy filmmaking tool. I’d argue in these scenes, music is used, both through its own form and through its source in the narrative, to reinforce the themes in each film. Both made by auteurs and icons in the African American community, they share the portrayal of music as an expression of pain and hardship and as an act of defiance in the face of institutional racism and capitalist exploitation. Music here is not used for entertainment value or to make up for sluggish montages, but to expand the film’s ideas and emotionally connect with the role music plays in our lives.