This James Toback movie is about Hip Hop culture & the influence it has on the American Kids while growing up. The way Black & White panned out, it seems to me that the scrip was written extemporaneously. Many parts felt disjointed and just did not gel well with the overall story. Or was there a story? Toback touches on a lot of issues and topics but he failed to fit them well into the story and therefore the final feel of the movie is more documentary like. He tries a little too hard to be cutting edge.

There are quite a few cameos in this movie - Mike Tyson, Brooke Sheilds, Joe Pantoliano, Jared Leto Robert Downey Jr. Had Toback worked more on the script and the screenplay, we would have had a great film about teens, race relations and cultural impact.

Although I loathe the pace of the movie and the story, I would surely watch it just for Downey Jr. He plays a documentary film maker, Terry who along with his wife, Brooke Shields, follow a group of rich white kids who are desperate to match their black hip-hop heroes.

The best moments in the movie belong to Downey Jr and his interactions with the characters. He hits on every guy in the movie including Mike Tyson! In the movie, a visibly nervous Downey sidles up to Tyson and mentions a dream he had about him that involved Tyson 'holding' him. At which moment Tyson, in pure rage, slaps Downey and grabs his throat. One can see the terror in Downey's eyes. This exchange is definitely electrifying and funny in a sense. Another moment is when Downey Jr confesses to his wife that he is gay towards the end of the movie & also his exchange with Jerad Leto at the club.

"Black and White" exploits and demeans black and white racial stereotypes in a mess of sensationalistic and pointless subplots. The film manages to almost sort itself out by the end though few will care. This steaming dogpile of cardboard cutout characters and pointless drivel is film making at it's worst and a good example of why right-wing conservatives are gunning for Hollywood.

Hip-hop is not just a style of music, for it comes associated with an attitude, an attitude that notoriously does not wholly reject the ghetto from which it springs. Whether the music, and culture, should thus be seen as the free expression of the dispossessed, or as one of the chains tying them down, is this a moot point (though it's worth noting that every revolution in popular music over the last half-century has been seen by respectable society as the end of the world). 'Black and White' is a celebrity-studded collection of small stories about characters living the hip-hop life, its focus on the interplay of the white community with this essentially black form of music. It's not badly executed, although it's hard to get very interested in any of the characters. One peculiarity, though, is how little hip-hop there actually is on the soundtrack, a strange vacuum at the heart of the film; also, we see little in the way of everyday life in the world from which the music emerged. The result is watchable, but there are no real insights, sociological or musical, to be had.