Passing Strange: The Movie (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

[lsanderson]

Daniel Breaker as Youth with Stew, at rear, in "Passing Strange," directed by Spike Lee.
A Young Artist’s Journey, This Time on Film
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: August 21, 2009

When I first saw “Passing Strange” on Broadway a little more than a year ago, I admired it, but with some reservations. This musical story of adolescent rebellion and artistic self-discovery, written by Stew (with music by him and Heidi Rodewald) from the raw material of Stew’s own life, simmered with energy and ideas, with sonic and verbal wit, but it also strained for a soaring, transcendent theatricality that it could not quite achieve. The show’s rootedness in the swerves and bumps of an individual biography struck me as admirable but also limiting, and its themes of creative ambition, racial identity and the search for that elusive thing called the real seemed to lie too heavily on the surface. More