In the summer of 2015 when RZA wrapped filming “Coco,” it had only been two weeks since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator to announce his intentions to run for president of the United States. By the time the film was retitled “Love Beats Rhymes” and released at the tail end of 2017, it was received by a different world than the one it was conceived in. A decade later, it feels like a fascinating remnant from another universe.
“Love Beats Rhymes” is a film with an interesting premise and bevy of star power, but it’s held back by less than stellar execution. Its general tone resides a notch above the works of Tyler Perry, but in a foot race, it sprints neck and neck with modern Lifetime originals and upper-tier Tubi flicks. But it’s those imperfections and foibles that make it more intriguing to revisit.
The film stars real life rapper/songstress Azealia Banks as Coco Ford, the only female MC in the all-male rap group SI’s Finest, led by her best friend/situationship Mahlik, an early role for Denzel’s son John David Washington. The group are beloved at rap battles, but can’t get a record deal because, despite their skill as verbal pugilists, they can’t put together real songs with any kind of structure or provide the sort of mainstream appeal labels are looking for.
Coco works at the diner her mother, Nichelle (Lorraine Toussaint), owns, but spends all her free time writing, performing, and convincing herself she’s not just a stress-free booty call to Mahlik. Tired of watching her daughter whittle away her potential and give her love to a man who couldn’t care less about her, Nichelle forces Coco to go back to school and get the final credits for her degree. She takes a poetry class that seems like an easy A, but it ends up transforming her life forever. This being the main thrust of the narrative, it’s also where things start to get strange.
Professor Dixon, the famous poet who teaches Poetry 101, is played by singer Jill Scott. Together with her hot TA, Derek (Lucien Laviscount), the entire educational apparatus seems at odds with Coco’s very existence. When pressed to perform a poem, Coco foolishly thinks her raps can be considered poetry. The class becomes a protracted humiliation ritual for her as she struggles to see the distinction between hip-hop and spoken word, between her lyricism and literature. The difficulty and conflict only increase when she becomes entangled in a love triangle between Derek and Mahlik, caught between two worlds but feeling out of place in both.
For a brief period this narrative feels emotionally honest enough to be compelling, as the film unpacks Coco’s relationship with her deceased father, how their closeness was transferred onto Mahlik when he passed, and how the biggest musical obstacle is her inability to be in touch with her own feelings. But in order to reach those scenes, the ones that might, in isolation, convince you this is an unsung gem begging to be rediscovered by the masses, there are so many tone-deaf moments to trudge through. There is a distracting dissonance between the reality the film constructs and the truth of hip-hop’s place in the mainstream.
Even at the time it was produced, renowned beatmaker 9th Wonder had gone from producing albums for rappers like Murs and David Banner to teaching classes on hip-hop history and the art of sampling at North Carolina Central University and Duke for almost ten years. It is true that hip-hop has always had a respectability problem that continues in various forms to this day, but the specific way the film portrays that feels like something out of a bad cartoon. This is even more striking today in Baltimore, where Peabody Conservatory has a hip-hop program.
The hypocrisy of sounding like a phone sex operator while lecturing about hip-hop’s inherent misogyny would be hilarious if it was a deliberate artistic choice, but the rest of the film suggests RZA wasn’t aiming for irony.
There’s something resonant about the way Jill Scott plays Dixon almost as a parody of herself, as the kind of woman who makes a meal out of every line, turning every stanza of her own work and every condescending lesson for Coco into unintentional, honey-drenched erotica. Scott pronounces “iambic pentameter” in a way that suggests she’s describing a heretofore undiscovered genital appendage. The hypocrisy of sounding like a phone sex operator while lecturing about hip-hop’s inherent misogyny would be hilarious if it was a deliberate artistic choice, but the rest of the film suggests RZA wasn’t aiming for irony.
That goes double for Laviscount’s Derek, the lightskin Brit love interest archetype who Netflix has popularized in recent years (the actor broke out on “Emily in Paris”). His sneering judgement of the very idea of rap comes off as comical once we’re forced to listen to his mediocre slam poetry that couldn’t be saved by any beat constructed by man or God. Which gets us to one of the twin cruxes of this film’s issues: poetry is such a uniquely subjective medium that it takes great storytelling prowess to effectively express meaningful nuance between good poetry and bad poetry.
There is a sequence where Coco is invited to a slam poetry event hosted by Dixon’s husband, Coltrane (played by the rapper Common), and she is asked to be one of the judges for the evening’s performances. We’re presented with an array of poets and poems, but it is not altogether clear who we are supposed to read as gifted and who as cringe. There’s one that to this critic’s ears sounded like a “Chappelle’s Show” sketch about how the average person hears slam poetry. But then, in a big moment later in the film, when Coco finally presents a personal work to the class about Black pain and strife, it sounds virtually indistinguishable from the one that felt so laughably fake earlier. But that’s when Coco is finally taken seriously.
For the antagonists’ viewpoints to feel authentic, Coco would need to be rapping about xanax and death and have face tattoos. Mahlik should look vaguely like Lil Pump or Lil Uzi Vert or Lil Something instead of the lesser Wu-Tang skit Washington plays him as.
The other big issue is that the music of Coco and her crew is described the way detractors would critique the popular rap music of the mid-’10s, but they seem to largely make ’90s throwback boom-bap sounds. For the antagonists’ viewpoints to feel authentic, Coco would need to be rapping about xanax and death and have face tattoos. Mahlik should look vaguely like Lil Pump or Lil Uzi Vert or Lil Something instead of the lesser Wu-Tang skit Washington plays him as.
Underneath it all, RZA’s direction is bland and uninspired, lacking the verve and excitement of his kung-fu pulp debut, “The Man with the Iron Fists.” Even the music he produced for the score feels like placeholder tunes. But somehow, Banks’ central performance rises above all that as the lone standout.
She feels earnest and likable and heartfelt, positioning her turn here as a grand “what if” proposition for a future where she doesn’t spend the next ten years in real life spewing ornately horrendous opinions, thoughts, and observations to serve herself consecutive counts of universal cancellation. A decade later, it’s confounding that someone who has grown so publicly villainous could be the heart and soul of such a mixed-up motion picture.
Maybe “Love Beats Rhymes” is where it all actually went wrong. Maybe RZA ripped a tear into the fabric of reality and we’re all still crawling ourselves out from the chaotic fallout. Maybe you should watch for yourself and find a way back.
“Love Beats Rhymes” is currently streaming on Hoopla and Kanopy with your library card, or can be watched for free with ads on The Roku Channel.