The Wackness Gets 1994 Hip-Hop Correct

The Wackness is a film primarily about a New York City teenager's coming of age one crazy summer, but what makes it a special is its close attention to detail: In particular, Wackness nails the experience and intensity of being a teenager enamored with 1994-era hip-hop.

Too many films use music as an accessory, when seminal musical moments in cinema have always emerged organically from the characters. For example, when you hear "Stayin' Alive," does anything else come to mind but John Travolta's New York City strut?

In Wackness, we first meet Luke Shapiro in his shrink's office, where he's inarticulate and ever-so-teenage, and then it cuts to the character wearing his omnipresent headphones (either on his head or around his neck), talking about his love of the ladies ("shorties") and his love of hip-hop (Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, the Wu-Tang Clan)—leading to the character's first real smile.

Hip-hop pulses throughout the film. One of Shapiro's main ways of connecting with his shrink (Sir Ben Kingsley) and his crush (Olivia Thirlby) is by making them mixtapes, and these tapes provide a soundtrack. Montages are struck to songs like Tribe's "Check the Rhyme," and a couple gets down to R. Kelly's "Bump and Grind." There's an on-screen shout out to Biggie Smalls: "This cat is going to change the world," says Method Man's Jamaican drug-dealer character. It's a nice moment, smacking of both tragedy and tribute.

"They were digging through the Wu-Tang crates," commented an audience member leaving the film. The music supervision in the film is so careful and full of love and authenticity that it's easy to relate to Shapiro's character: How he turns up the hip-hop to drown out his fighting parents, how throwing around hip-hop slang gives him words to say, and how the beat of a Raekwon song (the type of song that was certainly played at the bumpin' after-party, which had rumored appearances by Olsens and Redman) can energize his life, giving him an anthem to fall into, a way to escape. If you've ever loved music, felt a song surging through your soul, the energy of Wackness and its excellent use of music is something to admire.

We'll have more on last night's Q+A to come.

Ever-thorough blog The Playlist (who added Nas to the original still) has more details about the soundtrack.