Fresh Air - Thomas Mallon

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Writer Thomas Mallon looks back on the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when he was in his 30s, living in Manhattan. His friends were sick or dead, and he was terrified that he’d die, too. Excerpts of his journals from those years are collected in The Very Heart of It. He'll also talk about his latest novel, Up with the Sun, based on the life and murder of a little-known gay actor from the 1950s and '60s.Also, we remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who died Monday at age 96. And Justin Chang reviews Spike Lee's new film, Highest 2 Lowest.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Jesse Thorne. On Bullseye, we'll talk with Eugenio Derbez. Did you know that he voices donkey in Shrek? In the Spanish language, Shrek. I feel that the donkeys are Mexican, basically. So it sounds more Mexican in Spanish. Derbiz, one of the most famous people in Mexico. It's on Bolzai for Maximumfund.org and NPR. This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley. Living through the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the 1980s, is the subject of Thomas Mallin's Diaries, which were excerpted in the New Yorker a few years ago. They are now collected in his new book, The Very Heart of It, New York Diaries, 1983 to 1994. Mallon was in his 30s then and living in Manhattan. He was watching his boyfriend, friends, and fellow

churchgoers get sick and die, leaving him in a constant state of anxiety over if and when he'd get his own death sentence. Malin is best known for his historical novels. His latest, Up with the Sun, ends about where the journal excerpts begin. The novel is based on the life of a fairly obscure subject. Dick Coleman, a closeted gay actor in the 1950s and 60s who never quite made it. He was a part of Lucille Ball's Desilu Workshop and co-starred in the Broadway Musical 17. But after starring in a touring production of how to succeed in business without really trying, And in a 1965 sitcom called Hank, about the operator of a campus food truck, his rolls dried up.

Callman went into the antiques business with Dolores Gray, who had starred in several movie musicals. In 1980, Callman and his boyfriend were murdered in their Manhattan apartment by robbers, a murder that made the tabloids. Malin also has written novels about Watergate, Nixon, and the couple who shared Lincoln's box seats at Ford Theater the night he was assassinated. Terry Gross spoke with Thomas Malin in 2023. Thomas Malin, welcome to Fresh Air. You're such a good writer. Thanks. Why did you want to write about this actor Dick Coleman? I certainly had never heard of him before. I imagine most of the people in our audience have never heard of him either. I used to watch his sitcom in 1965 to 66, which was the one year it was on. I was 13 years old at the time and I desperately wanted to go to college. It was called Hank. by the way, for anyone who wants to know. The conceit was that he played a college drop-in. He didn't have the money for tuition, but he was desperate to get an education, and so he would

disguise himself as other students, and he was always one step ahead of the registrar who was chasing him. It was sort of charming and preposterous, and I used to watch it, and he sort of stuck with me, and the program stuck with me, and lo and behold, you know, in 1980, he's murdered long since out of show business, murdered in Upper Manhattan, the East Side of Manhattan. And I heard about this. And I began squirreling away clippings many years later. And I would set it aside. I really started to write the book in earnest around 2008, then set it aside for a decade to write this political trilogy set in Washington. and then went back to it.

And fortunately, in time enough to talk to a number of people who had known him and to be able to reconstruct the story as well as I could. By the way, Hank had a theme song. This had come Hank had a theme song with a lyric written by Johnny Mercer. I mean, that's pretty classy. That was about the only really distinguished thing about the program. Could you sing the lyric? The first line of it is he's up with the son and he's got the college winging as he goes about another swinging day.

And the conceit was that he was constantly doing odd jobs to earn money. He was raising his little sister because their parents were dead. I mean, it was kind of a comic tearjerker in some ways. And there was a tremendous sweetness to the character as well as a lot of gumption. Coleman, in real life, had plenty of gumption, but I think very little sweetness. I think people might have caught that that first line of the lyric, he's up with the sun. That's where the title of your novel, Up With the Sun comes from. Yes.

Yeah. So what kind of research did you do about what it meant to be gay and closeted on Broadway and in Hollywood? You know, one of the obvious differences is like on Broadway, so many men traditionally, you know, have been gay, including some of the best like songwriters, who ever wrote for Broadway musicals. In Hollywood, I think there was a big gay closet of population, but probably not as big as on Broadway.

Well, you know, I talked to people who had known Coleman and went through any number of hundreds and hundreds of clippings and reviews and everything. And, you know, it was the time when later in the 50s, when he was trying to get a foothold in Hollywood, he would be set up on dates, you know, by his

agent dates, needless to say, with young women and who were sort of aware or not aware that they were really, you know, functioning as beards for this. The lockdown, as you say, you would think of all places Broadway would be a place where to a certain extent you could be yourself. But I don't think that was really very true. spoke a few years ago to Rita Gardner, who was the original female lead in The Fantastics, which ran for decades and decades off Broadway. And she played the part opposite Kenneth Nelson, who figures in this book. He knew Coleman. Their careers sort of dovetailed each other in some ways for a number of years. And Kenneth Nelson was much beloved by people who worked with him.

And Rita told me that, you know, she says, of course I knew Kenny was gay. And sometimes I would see him troubled or down about something. And she says, as amazing as it sounds now, you just couldn't ask. Even in the world of off-Broadway theater, it was just too hot to handle back in those days. And she was remembering this in her 80s, and she was just shaking her head over it. Well, another thing that closeted actors on Broadway and also in Hollywood had to deal with is the gossip columnist because they could out you. I don't know if this was a real quote from Earl Wilson, who was a gossip columnist at the New York Post at the time. But in one of his columns, he wrote, which restaurant chain has been purging its New York branches of swishes?

That's for real. That's for real? Yeah. And there would be these obliquely phrased items about people. The gossip columnists had a tremendously hard edge. I remember I was a great reader of the newspaper from the time I was about seven years old. And I remember writers like Dorothy Gilgallon writing about show business, sometimes writing about politics too. And there was a hard edge. And if they took a dislike to somebody, they made these nasty little crusades against them. And this was the shame that could not speak its name, let alone the love that could not speak its name. But gossip columnists did find a way of getting it into the papers. For instance, here in Washington, where I live, the Washington Evening Star, a wonderful old paper. If you read it in the 1950s, the only time there's ever an overt mention of homosexuality is when somebody gets arrested. Thomas Mallon, your novel Up with the Sun ends at about the same time that your diary excerpts recently published in The New Yorker begins.

And those are your diaries, excerpts of your diaries during the AIDS epidemic, the very early days of it when you were living in Manhattan and so many people you knew had AIDS and were dying or had already died. So let's talk about those diaries. You were in your 30s in the 1980s, when AIDS was first identified and then became an epidemic. Who were you then? I was an academic who really wanted to be a writer. I taught at Vassar for about a dozen years. I started there in my late 20s. And while I was still there, I moved to New York.

I couldn't take living on campus and sort of being part of the college 24-7. So I rented this ancient little walk-up apartment right near Grand Central and began trying to extract myself from academic life. And in some ways, I was living my 20s and my 30s. I even wrote about that somewhere. I was getting some traction as a writer. I was beginning to write a lot of literary jobs. journalism. I was starting to write fiction on my own. And I was doing this in a way with very

little risk in my life compared to the way most young writers in New York have to operate. I was a tenured professor at this fancy college and then, you know, saw my way out of that. But whereas there was very little risk financially for me, very little risk professionally for me, I was suddenly engulfed in risk that all of my friends were. When it came to romance, I was rather a late bloomer, but not late enough that I wasn't worried that one involvement in particular that I had had would likely render me sick at some point. And we were, my friends and I, we were all beset with anxieties of one kind or another and had to make decisions. and consider contingencies.

I remember coming across something in the diary, I was writing a book about plagiarism, but I desperately wanted to write this second novel, and I was trying to think whether I dared to start the novel, and I thought, no, if I get sick, I'll probably have two years left, and I don't want to go out of the world with the two books half written. I'll stick with the book I'm working on now, the plagiarism book, and if I have to die, I will then at least have that book out in the world. And that was how one thought in those days, even while, at the same time, I was in love with New York.

I was in love with the little bit of literary progress I was making. My friends and I were having lives. We were having romance and so forth. What was it like rereading your diaries to edit them and then publish them? Because like you write historical novels and what was the present to you when you were writing those journals? That's now the past. That's now history. That's an artifact of a turning point in history. So what was it like seeing your life as history? Strange. It provoked feelings of embarrassment.

one's diaries always do that, if they have any kind of, I think, authenticity to them. Tremendous feelings of gratitude that I had never gotten sick and that I was here to write all the books that came in between those diaries and today. I was struck, though, by the immediacy of them. With editors at the New Yorker, there was some discussion at some point about my writing a retrospective essay about the time and simply quoting from the diaries, even quoting liberally from them, but situating them in a sort of retrospective point of view. And I argued against this because I thought if the diaries had any value at all, it was

their immediacy, the sense that the person writing this did not know what was going to happen, did not know what it meant yet. And when I reread them after so many years, what struck me immediately was a kind of of manic quality to them. There are entries where I am just absolutely slap happy. You know, I'm having my first author photograph taken or I'm going to some literary party that I never would have expected to be invited to years before. And the next day, all of that will come crashing down because there's been some terrible piece of AIDS news, either in the newspapers or, you know, in my own world. Somebody I knew was sick. And,

It seemed to me at the time, and the diaries brought this back to me, that I was living in a world where it was always going to be impossible to be happy for very long, that there would be these short bursts. But this looming, terrible, destructiveness was always going to be out there. You know, just a little stray sentence in those diaries was about having a great view of Manhattan when you. you dined one day at Windows on the World, which was the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. And a few years later, that would be totally demolished in the terrorist attack on 9-11. What was it like for you to reread that sentence and realize this, like, little factoid tucked away in your journal was part of this, like, national nightmare? Yes, these little things that jump out at you and that, you know, you never expected to see. And, of course, at the time you're writing it, you don't think that you could ever reread this

and have it mean something completely different from what it appeared to mean to you as you actually wrote the sentence. There are all these things that, you know, one is forgotten. sometimes the smallest things that you write, the smallest incidents, remarks that you heard, overheard, sometimes those are the things I found in a diary that evoke bigger things much more powerfully than if you had been writing about the big thing directly. Yeah. During the period that your AIDS Diaries cover, the period published in The New Yorker, your boyfriend at the time died of AIDS early.

in the epidemic. He was 31. You hadn't been seeing each other that long. Were you close enough where you felt like you were the one to take care of him? No, I mean, I wouldn't say that, but it was a short and very rocky romance, and it had all of the difficulties that any romance can encounter. But at the end, when he was very sick throughout 1984 and he died in October of 1984, at the very end, I became very close to his mother and close really to the rest of his family. And I remember the hospital and the harrowing nature of his illness that went on month after month. This was the time when if you visited somebody with AIDS in the hospital, they practically put you in a hazmat suit. You know, you were wearing masks and gloves and so

forth, and nobody knew very much. And this was very early to have that. The gift to me was really his whole family, especially his mother who remained my friends for decades. And I wound up having Thanksgiving every year with his mother, and I would bring my longtime partner, Bill, to New York. And, again, all of life really is a novel. You just live it instead of writing it, but it always has its odd turns and its strange narrative arcs. But that was a particularly painful time, the time that Tom was still a lot of. and suffering. And I have not really even been able to go back to that diary. The diaries that were excerpted in the New Yorker start in 1985. They run from 85 to 88. And I'm sort of living in the aftermath of that. And I'm probably going to do a book of these diaries for my publisher Knapp.

And I'm going to have to go back to the diaries when Tom was still alive. And that's going to be that's going to be a hard task for me. Did you visit him in the hospital and were you afraid that if you did, you would contract AIDS? Because as you said, people didn't know yet how it was spread.

I don't remember that fear in the hospital. I remember the fear of a fear that lasted for years that I would contract it simply because of the things we had done together before he was sick. But the atmosphere

in the hospital was just dreadful and there was almost a science fiction aspect to it. One of the sort of themes or one of the plots, if you could use that word, to the diaries that were excerpted in the New Yorker, this is around 1986, 87, was my internal drama wondering not just whether I was going to get sick or not, but should I have the test? The test was new in those days. Yeah, you were terrified to have the test. I was very frightened to have the test. I did not have the test until 1991. At that point, there was really nothing they could do for you. So what was the point of knowing? You already knew how you could protect yourself from infection. You already knew how you could protect others from infection. And if you happen to have the virus, if you were sick,

there was very little that they could do for you. Eventually, I mean, there was AZT was the first significant medication, but the side effects of it were absolutely horrific. And so I remember for years, I opted for not knowing. And what changed your mind in 1991 when you got tested? Well, I was partnered by that point, and I felt that the likelihood that I was sick was pretty small by that point. It would have manifested itself already in one way or another, so I was able to do that. But even in those days, in the early 90s, you would get tested and you would wait for two weeks for the result, as opposed to, you know, having a pinprick of blood taken from you today and getting the results within less than a minute.

Thomas Mallin, speaking to Terry Gross in 2023. After a break, we'll continue their conversation. We'll also remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who died this week at age 96, and Justin Chang reviews the new Spike Lee film, Highest to Lowest. I'm David B. In Cooley, and this is Fresh Air. How did I change your life when you knew that you were negative?

It made me feel that I could keep living and keep enjoying my life. There were so many things I loved about my life, even during the worst days of the epidemic in New York, when there were nothing to be done for anybody like Tom or a, so many of my friends. I absolutely loved my life. I was very driven. I was very hardworking. I was ambitious. I wanted to be a writer. I felt I was getting a late start as a writer, and suddenly things were happening. And I just remember the feeling that I'm not going to have to, maybe until I'm much older, I'm not going to have to sit down with that diary again and towed up the pros and cons of trying to write a second book while I'm writing a first one because I might not be around

to finish them within a couple of years. So you were so relieved to know that your death was not imminent. You're 71 now. Have your thoughts about aging been affected by how afraid you were that you were going to die in your 30s? I think it would be impossible for those thoughts and feelings not to have been affected. I am so aware of how lucky I was. And I mean, I've enjoyed rude, good health for almost my whole life.

I'd like that to continue for a while. But I like to think that, you know, when things fall apart, that I'll be able to accept that with a certain amount of greater grace because I know that it could so easily, all of those intervening decades, could so easily have been denied to me by life. And I don't know. That'll be a test of my character, I guess, when it comes.

Yeah. In your latest novel, Up with the Sun, one of the characters says, All my life I've loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world sleeping and finished that can't push you around, a place that your imagination can make as pretty

as the two-dimensional flats on a Broadway set. Is that a sentiment you share and is that one of the reasons why you write historical fiction? Yes, I think so. I think that's me speaking through Matt, my fictional pianist in Up with the Sun. I think that's always been a theme in my books.

I wrote a novel many years ago called Dewey Defeats Truman, which was all set during the summer and fall of 1948 in a little town in Michigan that had been Thomas E. Dewey's hometown. And there's an old man in that book named Horace Sinclair. And he expresses a lot of my preference for the past. The idea that the past is the present perfected somehow. put in amber, somehow an easier place to live in. He's the one who says, you know, some people when they pass a house, when they're walking on the street, they wonder who lives there. And he, when he walks past the house, always wonders who used to live there. Thomas Mallon, a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much.

Same here. Thank you, Terry. Thomas Mallon, speaking to Terry Gross in 2023. His new book is called The Very Heart of It, New York Diaries, 1983 to 1994. Coming up, we remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who died this week at age 96. This is fresh air. We're going to remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who had a devoted following among jazz fans, though she was less well known to wider audiences. She died Monday at the age of 96, and was recording and performing nearly until her death. Jazz critic Bob Blumenthal once wrote, quote, Jordan unmistakably conceives of her

voice as an instrument, and she is a great musician, unquote. Jordan grew up in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania. When she was 14, she moved to Detroit. And after listening to a jukebox recording by saxophonist Charlie Parker, she decided instantly she had found her

music, the music she wanted to sing. Not too many years later, she met Parker, who after hearing her sing one of his songs, said, you have million-dollar ears, kid. Eventually, she sat in with his band and became part of the jazz scene in Detroit in the 1940s. In the 1950s, she moved to New York, where she was part of a club and jazz session scene that included Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Max Roach. She also married Duke Jordan, the pianist in Parker's original quartet,

and they had a daughter. But the marriage didn't last. In 1962, Sheila Jordan made her first recording with the George Russell sextet, an avant-garde rearrangement of the ballad, You Are My Sunshine, a song Jordan had learned as a child. You are my... The sunshine My only Sunshine You made me

Make me happy when skies skies A grey The next year, Jordan became the first vocalist to record on the famous blue note label. Her album, Portrait of Sheila Jordan, was critically acclaimed. But she was a single mother, and it was difficult to support herself and her daughter with her music. She took a day job as a secretary in an advertising agency, where she worked until 1988. Jordan was influential on younger singers through her records, performances, and workshops. And in 2012, she was named a jazz

master by the National Endowment for the Arts. Before we listen to Terry's 1981 interview with Sheila Jordan, let's listen to Sheila's singing on the song If You Could See Me Now from her debut album. If you could see me now, you'd know how blue I've been. One look is all you'd need. to know the mood I'm in. Perhaps then you'd realize I'm still in love with you.

If you could see me now, If you could see me now, you'd find me being brave. And trying awfully hard to make my tears behave. But that's quite impossible. Oh, I'm still in love with you. Pretty early on in your singing, I think you got to turn on to Charlie Parker's music and got to meet him and sing with him too, I believe.

Yes, I did. I sat in a lot with Bird. I met Bird in Detroit when I was a teenager. I moved from Pennsylvania with my grandmother and went to live with my mother for the three years or four years of high school. But at that time, they had a fantastic jukebox downstairs, and it had all of these great, great records, you know, bras.

But Bird was the one that did it for me. I heard this thing. I said, oh, who is this man? What is this music? I mean, I really felt that it was just there for me. it was just planned that way that I was going to hear this music and I just got right into it

well of course I couldn't move after that into anything else except jazz even though I'd been singing never gave up singing and always had to sing this was it for me so after hearing these bird records and finding out where music like this

was heard I had to be there even if it was a matter of life and death which in Detroit at that time it was what do you mean Well, it was very prejudiced, and here I am, a young white girl trying to get to this music. So in order to get to that music, it was in black neighborhoods, and the police were very rough. I mean, we had the race rights there, which didn't help matters. So I was sort of torn between this terrible racial tension and wanting to be near these people who did this music

and not even thinking in terms of black, white, purple, green, hey, I just wanted to be where this music was. So I suffered a lot from constantly being taken down to police stations, quizzed about what I was doing with these black people, and of course that's not what they called them, and having to defend my relationship and my friendship with these wonderful people who taught me the art of jazz singing. I mean, they were my roots, all of these wonderful musicians, and just people who were learning like myself, like Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris,

I mean, Kenny Burrell, we all grew up together. We were kids, and we were growing up, and we would have died for one another. What was your way of interpreting what Parker was doing with or sworn into a vocal style? Well, I started out singing with two young black guys who wrote a lot of words to bird heads, and I wanted to be part of their trio. I wanted to sing with them, and they accepted me. And we used to rehearse all the time, and that turned me on. to more listening to what Bird was doing.

But, of course, I had done that before I met them. I don't know. I just, as I said, I felt very drawn to Bird's music, and I could hear it. I could hear, hey, that's Embraceable You, or that's I got rhythm. But what does he do with the bridge? Or that's honeysuckle rose,

but he plays another thing in the middle. I mean, I had very good ears, and I could hear all that. I really, I didn't deliberately set out to learn Bird. I was drawn to it. I really felt that I was, there was a stronger force than myself pushing me into this need to learn this man's music to know all I could. You came to New York 31 years ago, about 30, 31 years ago.

In 1952. 52? Uh-huh. What are some of the differences in the jazz scene in New York when you came and now? Well, when I first came here naturally, Bird was on the scene and Monk and Bud Powell and Miles and Sonny was just coming up and Jackie McLean, and I sort of hung out with them. It was exciting to go into these clubs, these 52nd Street clubs,

and hang out there, and hear this, you know, you could go across the street and hear bud. You could go across the street and hear bird. I mean, Max, they were all on the scene. Oh, it was thrilling, and of course for a kid, you know, at that time, especially if you were into Jackson. like I totally into jazz and dedicated to it. It was very exciting.

Sheila Jordan, speaking with Terry Gross in 1981. Seven years later, Jordan returned to Fresh Air to perform with bassist Harvey S. Here they are in the studio, performing the song Body and Soul. lonely For you are fine For you, dear only

Why haven't you seen it? I'm all for you but in soul I spend my days longing, and I'm wondering why it's me, you're wronging. I'm all for you, but in so I'm all for you, but in so. When you were in Detroit and you were listening to Parker, he would invite you, and in New York, too, he would frequently invite you to sit in with the band. It occurs to me that really a lot of the beboppers didn't have nearly as much respect for singers as they did for instrumentalists.

Was that not the case with Parker? With Bird, it wasn't the case. No, he was very, very open. And, you know, sometimes saying that I sat in with him sometimes turns into worked with him, which has never been. true, you know. It turns into what? Worked with him. Oh, oh, I assume you. Yeah, they get that, you know, that sort of thing all turned around, which is not true. No, he was very, very supportive to me. But did you feel you were up against that, the idea that a lot of the musicians didn't take singers as seriously as they took people who could play piano or bass or tenor? I think maybe a little bit in Detroit

at first, because everybody was out there trying to do his thing, and it got a little bit like that. But I must say that, the jazz musicians have been wonderful with me and have always supported what I've done and always encouraged what I've been doing. But I know it was there, but it just didn't get too much to me. I remember when I first found out that you had been working day job for years in an advertising agency, yeah, I thought like, how could this be possible? How could this singer possibly be spending her days? Typing. But for years, up until earlier this year, that's how you primarily made a living. Why did you have to do that? Well, because I couldn't sing the music that I wanted to sing and I really wanted to keep the music that the way I sing pure and I didn't

want to have to go out and hassle gigs that were weddings and, you know, bar mitzvahs and different things, club dates, top 40s because I can't do that. I don't do it well. There's people that do it so much better. So I didn't really mind that and I couldn't take a chance on when I was going to work next because I didn't want to bring my daughter up the way I had been brought up. I wanted that financial security of food and rent being there. Well, if anything happened earlier this year, you were laid off. I was laid off. I was devastated. But I'd prayed that I would, hey, now that I'm almost 60, please let me sing more. And then one day I was called in after 21 years at this particular place

and told, well, we're merging and we're getting rid of the department. Do you know, I really, I really was devastated. And then I thought, well, be careful what you pray for. You might get it. and I've been working ever since in music. Well, this has freed up time for you to do our concerts. That's fantastic. I don't know how I ever did it before sang and worked the day job. Sheila Jordan visited the studio with bassist Harvey S during an interview with Terry Gross in 1988. The influential jazz singer died Monday.

She was 96 years old. This fall, the Blue Note label plans to reissue her debut album, Portrait of Sheila. Coming up, Justin Chang reviewed. the new Spike Lee film, Highest to Lowest. This is fresh air. In Spike Lee's new crime drama, Highest to Lowest, Denzel Washington plays a New York City music mogul whose teenage son becomes the target of a kidnapping plot. The movie is a remake of the 1963 Akira Kurosawa classic, High and Low. Highest to Lowest opens in theaters this week and begins streaming on Apple TV Plus September 5th. Our film critic,

Justin Chang has this review. Back in 2013, Spike Lee directed a disappointing American remake of the cult-beloved Korean thriller, Old Boy. He later all but disowned the movie, claiming it had been edited down against his wishes. To date, Old Boy is the only one of his films that doesn't bear the signature words, a Spike Lee joint. Now, more than a decade later,

Lee has taken on a far greater Asian classic, Akira Kurosawa's masterful 1963 film, High and Low. The remake is called highest to lowest, and it's a Spike Lee joint through and through, a dazzling crime drama that boldly confronts

issues of race and class, art and commerce, all set in a modern-day New York that pulses with music, color, and life. It's blunt, a little messy, and altogether glorious, and it couldn't be mistaken for the work of any other filmmaking.

Curacao is high and low, was itself adapted from Ed McBain's 1959 novel, King's Ransom. And so there's a full-circle logic to bringing the story back to the U.S. Denzel Washington gives one of his best recent performances as David King, a music executive known for having the best ears in the business. David lives in a swanky Manhattan penthouse with his wife, Pam, played by Ilfanesh Hedera, and their teenage son, Trey, played by Aubrey Joseph. One day, David gets a call from someone who says he's kidnapped Trey and demands a ransom of $17.5 million.

As a police investigation gets underway, it soon revealed that Trey is actually safe. His best friend, Kyle, was snatched by mistake. Nonetheless, the kidnapper demands the same amount for Kyle's safe return, placing David in a tricky position. If he pays the ransom, it will ruin him, jeopardizing a major business deal involving the company he founded, Stackin Hitt's records. If he doesn't pay, he has to live with his guilt forever, especially since Kyle's father, Paul, an excellent Jeffrey Wright, is his driver and his oldest friend. In this scene, Paul begs David to pay the ransom and save his son's life.

Listen, beloved, I see all you do. And I can never stop thanking you for what you did for me. But I never really asked you for anything. You never had to. That's right. That's right. You gave to me freely. I love you for that.

Right now, I'm asking you for everything. I'm asking you for my life. Now, you ain't asking me for life. Right now you're asking me for $17.5 million. That's all people do is ask me for stuff. Can you get my son? Can you give me my ass? They just want me to pay it.

Stack hits. Pay for this. Give me that. Give me this. Put this on top of that, on top of that, on top of that, on top of that, on top of that, and this and that. As a crime saga, highest to lowest is solid, but the genre mechanics are less interesting than the underlying ideas. And if the dialogue in Alan Fox's script hits a few clunky notes early on, that's because it takes time to set up those ideas and maneuver them into position. As in all his best work, Lee gives the drama a rich personal dimension.

At 68, he's made a film about the struggle to stay relevant with age, and to go on making meaningful art in a world that's often hostile to it. Even before the kidnapping, David feels uncertain about his place in an entertainment industry where talent and creativity have taken a back seat to the whims of AI and social media. Race too is a factor, as it often is in Lee. movies. Fame and fortune represent something of a double-edged sword for a black man in the music biz, where commercial success can become shorthand for the establishment, or sellout. One of the movie's best performances comes from the charismatic hip-hop artist Asap Rocky,

who, as an up-and-coming rapper named Young Felony, is the ferocious voice of a new generation of black musicians, eager to work with, and perhaps dethrone the David Kings of the world. As with Kurosawa's high and low, the title of highest to lowest is a clear metaphor for class difference. And Lee, as always, delights in pointing out and amping up tensions between his characters. You can't help but notice how politely the cops treat the rich and famous David, versus how shabbily they treat Paul, who's poor, Muslim, and a nobody by comparison. But the film's class critique runs deeper still. It's built into the very structure of the story. In order to pay the ransom and hopefully catch the kidnapper,

David must leave behind his life of high-altitude luxury and descend to street level. And what he rediscovers, in the process, is the glory of New York, a city that Lee knows and loves as deeply as any filmmaker working today. The ransom scene is one of the most exuberant set pieces in any recent Lee movie, and it pays homage not just to the city, but to the thrilling and irrepressible cultural richness of America itself. Lee stages the sequence brilliantly aboard an elevated train on a hot summer day, specifically Puerto Rican Day.

And so when the action spills out into the traffic below, the plot collides with a massive parade, complete with a joyous performance by the Eddie Palmieri's Salsa Orchestra. Palmieri himself died earlier this month at the age of 88, and it's nice to see his great legacy saluted in this wonderfully entertaining movie. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Spike Lee's new film, Highest to Lowest. On Monday's fresh air, Bowen Yang, he's nominated for an Emmy for his performances on Saturday Night Live.

He'll talk about working on the show, his obsession with pop culture, which is why he co-hosts the podcast Las Culturistas, and the contrast between his life and the lives of his parents who emigrated from China. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorak. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman,

Julian Hertzfeld, and Deanna Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baltonado, Renzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and John Sheehan. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean Pooley.