love jones: Sweet Home Chicago

As much as the Industrial Revolution or the two world wars, this mass movement of people shaped the expressive life of the United States, enabling the Jazz Age, blues’s spread and amplification, and institutions like Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, which nurtured Charles White, Gordon Parks, and Gwendolyn Brooks. By the end of the seventies, the city’s South Side was home to the largest contiguous settlement of African Americans in the continental U.S. Darius and Nina are part of what some scholars have come to deem the “love jones cohort”: upwardly mobile Black singles born a generation after the migration’s upheaval, in the wake of the civil rights struggle, amid a period of policy rollbacks and municipal disinvestment. The two have reached adulthood during the last few precarious years an emerging artist could still find her footing in a metropolis. When a cross section of individuals, including members of the working class, were still visibly influential agents in urban life.

We hear no dialogue in the scene at the Wild Hare. After Darius and Nina leave, they share a long kiss and coquettish banter. We watch them make love. The song that plays, a version of “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” recorded by Maxwell and Marvin Gaye collaborator Leon Ware just for love jones, opens with wind chimes and coos its requests.

After Darius and Nina’s mostly auspicious meet-cute, they embark on a relationship built on the ruins of their previous ones, which is all that any of us can hope for. Their connection is instantly intense—“crucial,” as Prince sings in “Adore.” But to their friends—played by a delightful ensemble including Lisa Nicole Carson, Bill Bellamy, Isaiah Washington, Bernadette Speakes, and Leonard Roberts—the two are just “kicking it,” predicting the situationship-first commitment wariness of our current age. An old boyfriend, played with glib corporate braggadocio by Khalil Kain, returns to try to win back Nina’s affections, and Nina’s friend Josie (Carson) advises her to test Darius’s reaction to the news. Darius plays it cool, retaliates, and so, eventually, does Nina. The film presents more obstacles and misdirected endeavors before the couple reconnect in an enchanting and impassioned final scene.

love jones would deliver “romance instead of bump-and-grind sex,” the Los Angeles Times noted upon the film’s release. It promised novel entertainment along the lines of what critics like Greg Tate had been calling for: filmic “visions of Black life beyond homeys slangin’ and gangbangin’.” Despite this breath-of-fresh-air framing, its audience award from Sundance in 1997, and the Black celebrity status of Larenz Tate and Long (who’d played Brandi in Boyz n the Hood and Debbie in Friday, among many other beloved girlfriend characters), New Line did not recoup its investment until love jones had been in theaters for more than two months. Critic Nelson George called the film’s characters “bohos” who were “not black in the stereotypical way that we perceive ourselves, or other people perceive us.” In other words, the characters and their milieu were illegible. Perhaps to correct for this, the film’s trailer stitched together all of its most slapstick moments. It included none of what would most enthrall romantic, urban teen girls like me and my friends. There was no thick vibe of sensual urbanity, no warm red light, no plaintive strumming of the bass or cello. Many years before, studios told Kathleen Collins her characters in Losing Ground, a Black philosophy professor and her Black painter husband, were neither relatable nor ostensibly Black. The 1982 film, ultimately made independently, has only recently begun to be seen widely. But for a few risk-taking Hollywood executives, a failure of imagination could have cost us love jones.

Before we leave home, the year we all turn seventeen, we find a place on Overton and Main, in a part of downtown Memphis that was in the nineties still recovering from the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. There is exposed brick, wall tapestries of indigo and mud cloth, wafts of amber from burning incense. Saturday nights are reggae nights and where and how I first hear “Exodus,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The poets take over on Thursdays. I meet a firefighter who writes haiku, an artist who has carved a life of the mind on the margins of practical pursuits. An eight-hour drive apart, Memphis and Chicago share cultural and ancestral affinities, largely born of the Great Migration, and I can feel them in my body. Black nightlife has, across time, created its own geography, linking Precious Cargo in Memphis with the Wild Hare in Chicago and beyond—a network of creativity, leisure, and communal restoration. To create the world in love jones, Witcher filmed denizens of Chicago’s actual poetry scene, including his friend Regie Gibson, a poet as well as a “former Gangster Disciple,” according to the Chicago Tribune. Now we take for granted that Issa Dee in Insecure is whimsical and creative and also happens to drive a Lyft.

love jones foregrounds artists and their milieu and, in the process, tells a story about art making in community. The film’s score, composed by bassist Darryl Jones, was a similar communal undertaking. With Witcher’s guidance, Jones and his musicians modeled their work on Miles Davis’s score for the 1958 suspense film Elevator to the Gallows, which was recorded in a cavernous old building, as the movie played, in order to heighten the mood of the compositions. Similarly, Witcher’s musicians closely follow the narrative of love jones, mirroring and enhancing key scenes. When Darius runs to catch Nina at Union Station before she boards a train to a new job in New York, he races through traffic on his motorcycle among horns and shouts from angry motorists. It is a near miss, and the sax is in sync with Darius’s legs as he darts through the crowd and clumsily descends an up escalator. His speed is no match for the machine’s; in the train tunnel, the locomotive turns a corner he cannot. The notes become blue as he retreats.