Summer of Sam (1999)

Summer of Sam arrives as a sweaty period piece about the Bronx in 1977, a neighborhood marinating in heat, disco, punk, and the distinctively American urge to find a deviant and beat him senseless. Spike Lee's camera is less interested in David Berkowitz than in the ecosystem of suspicion that grows around him. The cast is a gallery of Italian-American faces, with John Leguizamo folded into the neighborhood without comment. The film has a gay subplot involving Ritchie's sex work at an adult theater and the homophobia that greets his punk affectations. That material is present and uncomfortable, but it is not framed as a lesson in acceptance. It simply sits there, another fault line in a community already cracking.

Male hypocrisy gets a thorough airing through Vinny's affairs and his panic at his wife's pleasure. The film notices Dionna's grievances, then lingers on bodies and orgies in a way that undercuts any claim to feminist clarity. Race flickers at the edges during the blackout and the scapegoating of outsiders, though the primary target is white ethnic tribalism. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of capital, no celebration of bodies, no progressive reading of mental illness, and no attempt to rewrite the historical record for contemporary comfort. The film is too busy being messy and lurid.

Lee does allow himself a few moments of social commentary about mob thinking and the violence of conformity. Those moments land with some force, but they arrive inside a narrative that prefers sweat and panic to preaching. The result is a difficult, overstuffed film that resists easy moral alignment. It is less a lecture than a fever dream in a borough that has lost its air conditioning and its patience.