In Theaters and Digital

Holy shit, this might just be my favorite interpretation of Macbeth. Shakespeare’s tragedy has survived castles, battlefields, boardrooms, and countless high-school English classrooms, but it feels unexpectedly at home here. Compton, as it turns out, suits the bastard just fine.

Writer-director Page Kennedy's nineteen-minute Macbeth in Compton takes Shakespeare's blood-soaked tragedy, drops it into mid-'90s Compton and lets ambition, paranoia, prophecy and violence find a new rhythm among rappers and streets that Kennedy clearly understands. The result could have been a gimmick—the sort of high-concept Shakespeare remix that exhausts its cleverness before the opening credits are finished—but Kennedy isn't fucking around. This is a proof of concept for a larger project, and by the time it's over, the concept has been proven.

More importantly, you want to see where the hell he takes it next.

The smartest move is also the funniest. Kennedy and his actors—including Candice Renee and Russell Hornsby—deliver Shakespeare as you’d expect, but the captions translate the Bard into contemporary Compton vernacular. The mouth gives us Shakespeare; the bottom of the screen essentially gives us, “Yo, you better shut your ass up.” It's funny as hell, but there's more going on than a gag. The subtitles translate attitude rather than simply replacing difficult words, revealing how little distance actually exists between Shakespeare's characters and Kennedy's.

Threats are threats. Lust is lust. Ambition is ambition. Somebody talking shit in 1606 isn't fundamentally different from somebody talking shit in Compton four centuries later. Kennedy, a rapper himself, understands that the language hasn't stopped working. We just stopped listening to its beat.

Kennedy also knows when to leave the goddamn camera alone. The short makes confident use of long, uninterrupted takes, giving the actors room to settle into the language and letting the performances build without chopping everything into editorial confetti. Renee is terrific, Hornsby brings exactly the sort of gravity you'd expect, and Kennedy comfortably holds the center of his own film. There's something inherently theatrical about the approach, but Macbeth in Compton never feels like filmed theater because Kennedy makes such effective use of the city itself. Compton isn't some provocative backdrop chosen to make the pitch sound edgier; its streets, rooms, cars, buildings, and neighborhood textures give the film an identity of its own. An excellent hip-hop-infused soundtrack ties Shakespeare's rhythms to those of the community, and there's grime here, sure, but also warmth, humor, music, and life. Compton isn't window dressing. It's part of the damn story.

At nineteen minutes, Macbeth in Compton isn't Shakespeare dragged kicking and screaming into the present. It's Shakespeare walking through Compton like the old motherfucker somehow knew the neighborhood all along.