Street Smart

Directed by Jerry Schatzberg, Street Smart follows an ambitious reporter (Christopher Reeve’s Jonathan Fisher) as he finds himself in a whole lot of trouble after fabricating a story about a New York City pimp – with the situation escalating after several figures begin to assume said story is about a real-life (and very dangerous) individual named Fast Black (Morgan Freeman). It’s a fairly irresistible premise that is, by and large, employed to above-average effect by Schatzberg, as the filmmaker, armed with David Freeman’s screenplay, delivers a briskly-paced drama that benefits from its eventful narrative and assortment of first-class performances – with Reeve’s solid work generally eclipsed by Freeman’s electrifying and downright mesmerizing turn as the menacing, volatile Fast Black. And while the picture admittedly does suffer from its share of lulls, with this particularly true of a fairly meandering midsection that spends too much time focused on Jonathan’s relationship with Kathy Baker’s hooker with a heart of gold, Street Smart, armed with its handful of spellbinding sequences (eg Fast Black threatens to poke out the eyes of one of his whores), predominantly comes off as a perpetually watchable (and sporadically enthralling) endeavor that exploits its somewhat larger-than-life setup to agreeable effect.

*** out of ****