This article appeared in the May 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee, 2025)

Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, which premiered Out of Competition at this year’s Cannes, is a giddy, gritty reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) that trades out the Japanese classic’s postwar-Tokyo setting for a contemporary New York City marked by stark divisions of class and race. With melodramatic bombast, the film translates the moral reckonings of David King (a typically arresting Denzel Washington), a legendary music producer in denial about his career’s decline, into the realm of epic allegory. David resides in a luxurious penthouse overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge with his adoring wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph). Still, he’s unsatisfied and plotting a professional comeback that involves reclaiming shareholder control of his company, Stackin’ Hits records. On the eve of finalizing this recklessly expensive deal, David’s life is rocked by a crime: a mysterious caller later revealed to be the wannabe rapper Yung Felon (a vibrant A$AP Rocky) attempts to kidnap Trey for ransom, but instead, accidentally nabs the son of David’s chauffeur, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright).

In its second half, which sees David pursuing justice on the streets where he was raised, Highest 2 Lowest transforms into an urban thriller of bracingly choreographed set pieces amid throngs of sports fans and parade-goers. Washington’s fluid performance gives the film’s ideas about power, envy, and the tensions between different generations and economic classes an epic weight, while also, somehow, keeping things light. His sly sense of humor and gestural playfulness complement the film’s cheeky undertow, also bolstered by Lee’s own insights into the benefits and harms of modern technologies—as well as the uncertain fate of creative industries.

A few days after the film’s premiere at Cannes, I sat down with Lee to discuss the nature of his (now-fifth) collaboration with Washington and the inherently cinematic features of the Big Apple.

You last worked with Denzel 19 years ago on Inside Man (2006).

Man, Denzel and I—we didn’t even realize that until we were told.

Do you see each other regularly?

No, but if the Knicks or the Lakers go, like, five games, then we’ll be out there. He has a place near me, but we don’t see each other every day. We’re cool. But it’s not like we’re calling each other up all the time. It’s not that type of relationship. I always want to work with him. But that’s life. We’ve got different projects. He was doing Equalizer stuff. I’m doing my thing. But the intent—that we were gonna work together again—was always there.

Was Highest 2 Lowest built around Denzel? I can’t really imagine anyone else in the role. 

Yeah. He was attached to the film already and brought me into it. It was easy. He said, “Spike, read this and see if you like it, and maybe we can go at it again.” Then all of a sudden we’re in the saddle again.

The film is filled with these images and icons of Black culture—quite literally, in the artwork and decorations around David King’s apartment—and his casting complements that. 

There’s the Basquiats. Romare Beardens. Kehinde Wiley. For me it was all about conveying Black excellence, you know? This is a family that has the money to buy art like this. Pam, David’s wife, is on the board of the Studio Museum in Harlem. From their living room you can see Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. He’s driving a Rolls-Royce. Several times in the film, he says, “I’ve got the best ears in the business.” So we wanted to show Black affluence and power.

The way that’s set up in the script and plays out in the first half, in particular, reminded me of a classic melodrama. You’ve got the archetypes: this great man, his beautiful wife, his doting son. 

Well, where do they live?

They live at the top of the tallest tower. 

Yeah [Laughs]. It’s not High and Low. It’s Highest 2 Lowest. It’s not a remake, it’s a reinterpretation. The Kurosawa film is set in Tokyo, and the protagonist is a shoe-company executive. Here, we’re dealing with the music industry, but the big difference is that we’re in New York City, which is not really part of the United States. We do our own thing. Not “thing”—T-H-A-N-G. And that’s why people love and hate New York. But we don’t care. The extremes come naturally because that’s New York today, which is why we had to shoot there.

In the beginning, we’re in the bougier, untouchable parts of New York, but we progressively go through places that feel more lived-in and grittier. 

That’s right. We’re in Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Boogie Down. Yankee Stadium. The film is supposed to smell like New York. And it’s not perfume. You see the grit. We get on the Number 4 train from Borough Hall all the way to 161st Street.

We’re on the train for the ransom-delivery scene, when the “highest” meets the “lowest” and David first encounters the kidnapper, Yung Felon, and his lackeys. That’s a terrific set piece.

Here’s the thing. I really wanted to emphasize that the villain character is not some ghetto-thug rapper. He’s very smart, and he’s thought out a plan that will make it very difficult for the NYPD to keep up. He uses the black Michael Jordan backpack with the Jumpman [logo], which is everywhere. So he’s using all these chaotic elements that are already baked into the city: the subway, the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

The Yankees are playing a home game. 

And they’re playing against the motherfuckin’ hated Red Sox. So you know it’s going to be 50,000 people out there taking the subway. Have you seen the video of Knicks fans celebrating after the last game [of the semifinals], when we beat the Celtics? That was like 10 times the chaos of New Year’s Eve. When we win the NBA Championship, they’re going to need the National Guard. That’s too many people for the NYPD. They won’t know what to do.

Why give Yung Felon such a literal name? 

You know who came up with that name? Rocky [Laughs]. I didn’t protest.

Did Rocky weigh in on any other elements? For instance, I love the fact that David figures out the culprit is Yung Felon by listening to his track and recognizing the lyrics from kidnapping victim Kyle’s testimony. 

That part was in the script from the get-go. I told Rocky, “Give me two songs.” So he came up with the song that becomes the clue as well as the song he’s recording in the studio.

That’s another great scene, the studio face-off.

It’s like the classic showdown in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). You have this young buck up against the guy he’s trying to take down. That’s classic cinema. That’s Shakespearean. But it was also about reinforcing the generational gap between them. In the end, David says, “Your music’s not for me.” He’s more like a Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy kind of producer. He’s not necessarily into newer forms of rap.

But he also knows how to rap! Was Denzel improvising here, or were his lines in the rap battle already in the script?

I’ll tell you what happened, because I didn’t actually know what he was going to do until we started to shoot. Denzel went back to one of Nas’s old albums, picked a song, and used its lyrics for that scene. Rocky didn’t know about this. Denzel would rhyme. Rocky would rhyme. Finally, Rocky says, “What the fuck is this, a rap battle?” That was totally organic.

Did he improvise like this when you first started working together? How have things changed in terms of how you direct Denzel’s performance, if at all? 

It’s been a blessing to do five films with my brother Denzel Washington from Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon. But my approach has always been simple: “So, Denzel, how would you like to do this?” Maybe once or twice I’ll sit him down and give him a suggestion. He’ll take it, but he’s in full command of his craft. It’s pretty rare that I ask him to try it a different way. The work we do is mostly during rehearsals, where we discuss and make decisions. We’re not on set, you know, tap dancing. We know what we want when we get there. Denzel gets right down to it. He doesn’t want to do 20 takes.

So he’s efficient.

“Let’s go. Let’s move on to the next setup. Next setup. Next setup.” There’s an urgency. But there’s a difference between being rushed and being urgent. Because we’ve done the work and are prepared when we come to set in the morning.

How long were rehearsals?

About a week.

So many little bits of his performance are disarming, even though they’re just tiny hand gestures or certain line deliveries. It’s like he’s making them up on the fly—like the moment when he’s doing a finger gun that he points at others and himself. 

What you’re perceiving is simply the genius of Denzel Washington. For example, the scene when Jeffrey Wright’s character comes in and begs him to pay the ransom for his son. At the end of that, Denzel picks up a fake grenade and says something along the lines of, “I’ve felt many times like blowing someone up.” That’s not in the script. That grenade was just a random prop on his desk. He uses the props around him—everything he sees around him—to create the moment.

Another way you emphasize the two men’s generational gap is through David’s criticism of A.I. and social media. Yung Felon ultimately goes viral, but David’s not interested in that kind of fame. 

I hate A.I. That was me speaking when David says, “A.I. makes music that has no soul, no spirit.” That’s how I feel about it. I don’t want to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but I’m glad the Writers’ Guild of America is fighting to ensure that creative material will not be written by a computer. What about education? Kids are turning in papers that their computers wrote. Creativity, art, the human soul—it’s at risk of being replaced by machines! That’s another film, though.

And yet you also seem to be pretty active on Instagram. I noticed the fake newspaper covers in the film, with David styled as the Black Panther, seem modeled after the Daily News and New York Post basketball covers you’ve posted on your account.  

Also the two women David auditions, the one with the guitar in the beginning and the singer at the end—I found those artists on Instagram. I tracked them down and met them. Check out @OfficialSpikeLee. You’ll see a portrait that Kurosawa signed to me, too. I had the honor of meeting him, someone who’s been important to me since my days at NYU Film School and the making of my film She’s Gotta Have It (1986). He wrote all of his autographs with a paintbrush and white ink. That’s one of the objects I treasure most.

Beatrice Loayza is a writer and historian who contributes regularly to The New York Times, The Criterion Collection, The Nation, 4Columns, and other publications.