There is a ridiculous scene in the pilot of HBO’s “Vinyl” where Richie Finestra accidentally discovers hip-hop. A traffic jam has forced the burnt-out record executive, played by Bobby Cannavale, to detour through the Bronx. He makes his driver pull over when he hears music spilling out of a building. There’s a young, cool crowd dancing blissfully to the music of a DJ with two turntables. “Hey, baby,” says one of the two women who’ve materialized at the car’s open window. Richie asks who’s in charge. A man in a red fedora appears and offers “blow, reefer, ‘ludes.” But when Richie asks, “What is this place, this music?” the man points a gun at him. “What’s it to you, motherfucker?”
It’s an uncomfortable moment for more than one reason. The parade of crime Richie encounters the minute he parks in a black neighborhood is absurd. Even sillier is the notion that a sleep-deprived, middle-aged, white label head would not only stumble upon the birth of hip-hop, but understand that he was hearing something revolutionary. Set in 1973, the events of “Vinyl’s” first season would’ve coincided with the very first parties DJ Kool Herc threw in the rec room of his West Bronx apartment building. A Herc character briefly shows up later in the season, and in May, the real Herc sued HBO for using his name and likeness without permission.
Those awkward, allegedly illegal early scenes were surely intended to foreshadow a multi-season hip-hop storyline. But now that “Vinyl” has been canceled (and rightfully so), their real legacy is as a cautionary tale for white television creators depicting nonwhite music scenes. Maybe Baz Luhrmann was paying attention, because the Australian filmmaker’s new Netflix show keeps anachronistic Columbusing to a minimum.
A coming-of-age drama anchored in the late ’70s Bronx hip-hop and disco scenes, “The Get Down” has a deep respect for the innovations it’s portraying—and the pioneers responsible for those breakthroughs. Instead of plundering the legacies of the icons who hover at the edges of a show whose central characters are fictional, Luhrmann brought on Nas, Grandmaster Flash, and Kurtis Blow as producers. The director’s long list of consultants features legendary rappers, dancers, and graffiti writers—plus Herc himself. The result is a work that, at least initially, blends history and original story quite well. TV offers no shortage of stories about musicians and the people who make money off them, but Luhrmann’s careful world-building results in the rare musical drama that actually does justice to the music.
“The Get Down” opens in 1977, just as school is letting out for the summer. Smart, dreamy Ezekiel Figuero (Justice Smith) embarrasses himself on the last day by writing a poem about his parents’ deaths that wins him a candy bar, his teacher’s admiration, and whispers of “faggot” from his classmates. He’s fallen hard for his best friend Mylene Cruz (Herizen Guardiola), a talented singer who’s too fixated on launching a disco career—and escaping her pastor father Ramon’s (Giancarlo Esposito) religious fanaticism—to make room in her life for love.
But Mylene doesn’t realize how far Zeke will go to win her over. When he learns she’s planning to sneak into Les Inferno, the local discothèque, and put her demo into the hands of its star DJ, he resolves to surprise her there. Denied entry to the club, Zeke crosses paths with Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore), a streetwise charmer who orbits Les Inferno’s debauched crime-boss owner, Fat Annie (Lillias White), and is the protégé of Grandmaster Flash (Mamoudou Athie). They start to fight over a record Shaolin stole straight out of Zeke’s hands earlier that day, but the younger boy’s lovesick fatalism endears him to his assailant.
That same night, Shaolin introduces Zeke and his best friends, the three Kipling brothers (Jaden Smith, Tremaine Brown Jr., and Skylan Brooks), to the hip-hop scene. Put on the spot at Flash’s underground party, Zeke discovers a talent for freestyling and wannabe-DJ Shaolin sees that his new friend is the “wordsmith” partner he needs. On the roof of his building, just before sunrise, Shaolin dubs his crew the Fantastic 4 + 1. “We gonna be bigger than Les Inferno, we gonna be bigger than Yankee Stadium, we gonna be bigger than the whole fuckin’ Bronx,” he tells Zeke. But Zeke is always ready to up the ante on an aspiration. “We gonna be bigger than the world,” he counters. It’s an exchange that sounds cheesy on paper, but Smith and Moore’s chemistry—which falls just short of homoeroticism—makes their big talk believable.
The Fantastic 4 + 1: Skylan Brooks as Ra-Ra Kipling, Justice Smith as Ezekiel, Tremaine Brown Jr. as Boo-Boo Kipling, Shameik Moore as Shaolin Fantastic, and Jaden Smith as Dizzee Kipling.
As the boys absorb Flash’s wisdom and Mylene strives to attract the music industry’s attention, we hear a grown-up Zeke narrate stories from his youth in a series of evocative raps written by Nas. These kids are surrounded by an adult world of crime, corruption, and moral compromises that keep intruding on their relatively innocent dreams. Mylene’s uncle, Francisco Cruz (Jimmy Smiths), is a powerful figure in South Bronx politics. He’s got a utopian vision of a prosperous, multicultural borough, but he doesn’t mind manipulating people to get what he wants out of the city—or for Mylene. Teen gangs commit arson and carry out contract killings for more sophisticated criminals like Fat Annie. Luhrmann and co-creator Stephen Adly Guirgis, a playwright who won the Pulitzer for 2014’s Between Riverside and Crazy, preserve their characters’ idealism without glossing over the harsh realities of life in their neighborhood. The Fantastic 4 + 1, who are still learning the basics of DJ culture in the show’s early episodes, wander through the rubble of buildings torched for insurance money. Kids younger than they are wind up dead.
The decision to set the show in 1977 allows “The Get Down” to bring Zeke and his friends into a culture that already exists but hasn’t broken through to the mainstream yet. (Richie Finestra sure must’ve taken his time—hip-hop’s first hit, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, didn’t come out until 1979.) It also suggests Lurhmann and Guirgis did their homework. As Shaolin informs these newcomers, Flash, Kool Herc, and Afrika Bambaataa have already staked out turf.
Their prominence makes realistic space for five starry-eyed artists in a borough where DJs haven’t replaced gangsters so much as stolen their cachet. “It was not, as many well-meaning journalists and academics would later erroneously write, that the block party or sound system showdown had replaced the rumble or the riot,” Jeff Chang writes of the Bronx in 1977, in his essential hip-hop history Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. “The truth was, in fact, much less dramatic and much more profound. In the Bronx’s new hierarchy of cool, the man with the records had replaced the man with the colors. Violence did not suddenly end; how could it?”
There are plenty of typical Baz Luhrmann flourishes in “The Get Down,” especially in a 90-minute pilot with two long party sequences. But only rarely does the director of Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge get so carried away with slick genre pastiche that he loses sight of the human story he’s telling. Luhrmann has always been at his best orchestrating bacchanals and breathless romances, and “The Get Down” plays to these strengths. Every party looks dizzyingly fun and every glance Zeke and Mylene exchange is electric. Fueled by their respective musical gifts, his pursuit of her transcends the standard TV “will they/won’t they.” Zeke’s creative partnership with Shaolin is just a different kind of love affair.
Luhrmann’s romantic sensibility is perfectly suited to the true subject of “The Get Down”: the transcendent power of music. Before Zeke finds an outlet for his eloquence in hip-hop, he’s a promising but reluctant student with no parents or prospects. Viewers get an education along with him, as Flash teaches DJing 101 and Zeke’s raps provide each episode with exposition. For Mylene, stardom seems like the only way out of her father’s repressive home and church. The world they inhabit, for all its poverty and danger, reverberates with music of all kinds. Aside from disco and hip-hop, there’s a neighborhood record store owned by an aging rasta. Jazz is the music of choice at the Kiplings’ bohemian home, where their friends are always welcome for dinner. A beauty-parlor dance party breaks out when “Turn the Beat Around” comes on the radio.
Such sublime moments are rare on music soaps like “Empire” and “Nashville,” which mix artistry with industry intrigue and have produced some decent original music. They’re even harder to find on shows like “Vinyl,” which made jaded record executives—usually white, male ones—the conduit for every musical epiphany. The few musician characters “Vinyl” did follow, like proto-punks the Nasty Bits, seemed designed to position artists as mere lumps of pretty, angsty flesh in denim jackets, waiting to be shaped by genius A&R guys. (Imagine the damage Richie would’ve done if he’d actually gotten to meet the DJ at that Bronx party.) Cameron Crowe’s Showtime series “Roadies,” which chronicles the backstage drama of an aging band’s tour, is even more crass. Its conceit ensures that sex, drugs, and growing up in your forties play a larger role than musicians and performances that get relegated to the edge of the frame.
One major problem with “Vinyl,” led by prestige-TV lifer Terence Winter (“The Sopranos,” “Boardwalk Empire”), was that it tried too hard to emulate antihero dramas like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” Both of those shows hinged on deeply flawed men whose brilliance made them fascinating. The difference between “Mad Men” and “Vinyl,” though they were both set in creative industries, is that Don Draper was an artist of sorts. His most magical moments—pitch meetings—were performances. There’s a reason why the series ended with an advertising epiphany. But Richie Finestra did not make art and did not seem brilliant. That made it tough to see past his monstrousness.
“The Get Down” has a captivating hero in Zeke (and an ideal lead actor in Justice Smith), but Luhrmann and Guirgis know better than to make a mini Don Draper out of him. They’re more interested in the complex set of circumstances that created hip-hop than in one genius’ origin story. In that sense, the show has the most in common with a different HBO series: David Simon’s “Treme.” Set in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “Treme” illustrated—through long scenes of live music and dancing—how the city’s musicians sustained beleaguered residents through years of painful rebuilding. Though Luhrmann embraces fantasy while Simon favors stark realism, both creators realize that the best stories about music are really about community.
