Dave Chappelle has the stretch and bounce of an elastic band pushed just shy of the breaking point. That goes not only for his beanpole physique but also for the breadth and range of his humor and sympathy. His superficially wayward yet dead-on aim makes him constantly surprising. What's most enveloping about him is his generosity of spirit. He's a small-D democrat, small-C catholic satirist of race. And he's a celebrant of all that's genuinely funky.
 
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In 2004, after receiving a $50 million contract for a third season of Chappelle's Show (and before he balked and went to Africa), the comedian threw a free hip-hop concert in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Sept. 18. In Dave Chappelle's Block Party, the director, Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), simply records the build-up and the play-out of the event, shooting it in sherbety colors and editing it in an ice-cream swirl.
Gondry follows Chappelle around his hometown -- Yellow Springs, Ohio, near Dayton -- as, like Willie Wonka, he offers Golden Tickets to homies of every age, sex and color. The tickets cover a chartered bus ride to Brooklyn and a hotel room.
Chappelle inspires wonder in an aging white woman who must figure out what to wear to a rap event. He rouses behavior-altering delight in two African-American pals: They're so intent on making the trip East they restrain themselves from responding to a racial slur on a golf course. He catalyzes a chorus of astounded cheers and laughs from Ohio's Central State University marching band ("The Invincible Marching Marauders") when he invites them to join the bill.
Some of the movie's sunniest moments arrive as Chappelle ambles through Ohio. He's an observational comic with a drawling syntax that's almost as sly as Mark Twain's. He asks the CSU band director whether he's the first black ever named Milsap. He sits down at the Ha Ha Pizza joint and notes that when hippies founded it in 1971, some of their recipes actually made you laugh.
He doesn't lose his magic touch for magnanimity when he arrives in the Big City. For his concert spot he picks a street corner fronted by a wacky, broken-down building called "Broken Angel" -- named for a smashed ceramic seraph the resident white couple salvaged on the day they met -- and a daycare center whose graduates include murdered rap legend Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G.).
The movie overflows with unforced juxtapositions. Chappelle proves blessedly sane at confronting them. He takes it in stride when the mistress of the Broken Angel says she can't stand the profanity of rap and prefers Rachmaninoff -- just as he feels comfortable telling the camera that, for all its sentimental value, the Broken Angel building looks like an ideal movie location for a crackhouse. Chappelle presents the legend and legacy of Biggie Smalls as an ongoing fact of life: a touchstone for endangered young black manhood. But the small children at the daycare center provide an electric jolt of exuberance and innocence.
In his TV show's second season, Chappelle set out to prove electric guitar brings whites to their dancing feet -- and drums do the same for blacks. Even if you're not in the core fan base of Chappelle's musical All-Star team, which includes Kanye West and the Roots (with Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap), their pounding vocals supply the movie with sustained blasts of rhythmic power. As Roots and company aptly put it: "Boom!"
Gondry and his crew don't even try to present seamless musical numbers. They scramble backstage and audience footage into the numbers. But they record the sound keenly enough to capture with full force the militant black-empowerment themes of Dead Prez in "Hip Hop." And they provide scattered images of crackling live-performance moments, like Erykah Badu tossing away her wild Afro weave in a wind-and-rain storm as she sings "Back in the Day" in a hard-edged croon.
Mos Def, the best of all rappers-turned-actors, maintains an undercurrent of wild humor whether he's riffing with Chappelle on the comic powers of percussion or rapping during "Universal Magnetic" that he'll "bounce out of the speakers and stick to you."
In an amazing climactic coup, Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras reunite as the Fugees for their lethal cover of Roberta Flack's great hit, "Killing Me Softly." (Jean is also in top form when he advises students to raid their libraries for knowledge and to resist blaming whites for black failures. Then he sings "If I Was President.")
Chappelle feels an instinctive link between musicians and comedians. He's such a fan of Thelonious Monk that he devoted days of his life to mastering Monk's "Round Midnight" without any musical training. He loves Monk's timing because when the jazzman seemed off-rhythm, he was really on. The same is true of Dave Chappelle.
>>>Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Rogue Pictures) Starring Dave Chappelle, Mos Def, Kanye West, Erykah Badu and the Fugees. Directed by Michel Gondry. Rated R. Time 100 minutes.
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