Poetic Justice (1993): Lucky, Opposite Janet Jackson

The first time I watched Poetic Justice, I was expecting the Tupac of Juice. Bishop, the rage, that stare that frightens you. Instead, for two hours, I watched a young mailman drive a postal truck up the California coast, carry his daughter on his shoulders and try, clumsily, to thaw a hairdresser walled up in her grief. The shock was there, just not the one I’d expected. This film shows a Tupac most people never bothered to discover.

Singleton’s second film

In 1993, John Singleton was coming off Boyz n the Hood, which had made him, at 24, the youngest director ever nominated for the Best Director Oscar. Everyone expected a follow-up in the same vein: hard, urban, masculine. Singleton did exactly the opposite. Poetic Justice is a sentimental road movie told from a woman’s point of view. Justice, a hairdresser in South Central, has been writing poems since her boyfriend was shot dead in front of her.

Justice is Janet Jackson, in her first major film role. Opposite her, Singleton initially wanted another actor, then changed his mind and cast Tupac, whom he had already spotted and would later put in a leading role again. It was a bold bet. Tupac was coming off Juice, where he played a teenager sliding into murder. Here, he had to carry the romantic half of the film.

Lucky, mailman and father

Lucky is no street boss. He sorts mail, vaguely dreams of making music, and above all he’s raising his daughter Keisha alone, having pulled her away from a drug-addicted mother. That detail changes everything. Tupac plays fatherhood with a disarming tenderness, never forcing a beat of it. When he holds the little girl in his arms, you no longer see the rap icon. You see a 21-year-old kid taking his job as a father seriously.

The film then rests on a simple device. Justice, whose car has let her down, hitches a ride in Lucky’s postal truck from Oakland to Los Angeles, with a couple of friends thrown in. They can’t stand each other, they argue, they grow closer. Nothing revolutionary on paper. But the chemistry between Jackson and Shakur does the work, precisely because it’s abrasive. Their fights ring true. So do their silences.

The poems of Maya Angelou

What gives the film its particular color are the poems Justice reads in voice-over throughout the story. They weren’t written by Singleton or some anonymous screenwriter. They’re by Maya Angelou, the towering American poet, who agreed to lend her texts to the character and who actually appears in the film, in a family reunion scene.

My favorite anecdote comes from the shoot. One day Angelou came across a young man beside himself with anger, on the verge of a fistfight, and took the time to calm him down by talking to him about his worth, about what entire generations had paid so that he could be standing there. She had no idea who he was. It was Tupac. She would later recount that he ended up in tears. Once you know his own book of youthful poems, which I write about in The Rose That Grew from Concrete, the meeting between those two takes on a wild resonance.

The test affair

You can’t talk about Poetic Justice without the story of the screening test. Before shooting the kissing scenes with Janet Jackson, the singer’s camp reportedly demanded that Tupac take an HIV test. He took it very badly, and you can see why. His answer, later relayed by Singleton himself, fit on one line: he would take the test the day actual sex with her was on the table, not before. He refused, the scenes were shot anyway, and the episode has endured as a symbol of the suspicion the industry held against him, even while opening its doors.

What the role reveals

The Tupac of the movies is too often reduced to his hard characters: Bishop in Juice, Birdie in Above the Rim, whom I cover in the final roles. Lucky proves he could hold down the exact opposite. The scene where he learns of a family tragedy midway through the film, his face shifting from disbelief to collapse, remains for me one of his finest moments as an actor. No showboating, no pose. Just a man absorbing the blow.

That gentleness, that owned vulnerability, is what you find on record in the same period, particularly in the most intimate tracks of Strictly 4 My… and then Me Against the World. Cinema didn’t invent that Tupac. It simply filmed him up close.

Where to watch it today

Poetic Justice is easy to find as a digital rental or purchase on the usual platforms, Apple TV and Amazon first among them, and it rotates regularly through subscription streaming catalogs as rights come and go. There’s also an American Blu-ray edition, easily tracked down as an import for those who, like me, enjoy owning things.

One last piece of advice. Watch it in the original version. Tupac’s voice, his delivery, his calculated hesitations are part of the performance. And if you discover his film work through this movie rather than through Juice, you’ll have made the journey backwards from everyone else. That’s not a bad thing. You’ll first see the man he could have become on screen, before seeing the one Hollywood preferred to have him play.

#cinéma#john singleton#janet jackson#maya angelou