Poetic Justice Is a Movie-Long Exploration of Why Janet Jackson Isn't Smiling

It’s still rare to encounter a movie made by a man that is so invested in its woman character’s interior. If Justice appears blank, that’s merely a superficial impression. You aren’t looking deeply enough. Jackson and Singleton’s collaboration invites you to do so. Justice is numbed by her reality, and her voiceovers (in which she frequently recites her poetry, in actuality preexisting works by Maya Angelou) allow us a peek into a life to which Justice’s associates are rarely privy. A spellbinding scene finds Justice cycling through emotions as she listens to a 45 of Stevie Wonder’s “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer.” Jackson stares directly into the camera saying more in about a minute of screen time than much of her dialogue permits.

Including a scene like this is bold not just because of Jackson’s emotional candor, but because of Singleton’s willingness to experiment in a heavily anticipated summer release. Despite the respect Singleton commanded with his debut (for which he was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards) and Jackson’s star power, Poetic Justice was regarded as an overall risk. “I was warned by powerful forces in Hollywood that an all-Black movie was the wrong move,” Jackson told Rolling Stone in 1993. “Conventional wisdom said I should make a musical. Go for the mainstream white market. Play it safe. John had the same feelings I did – do something different. Then when I accepted the role, other voices started asking, ‘How can a rich girl from the burbs play a homegirl from the hood?’ My reaction was ‘Well, watch me.’ Besides, isn’t acting about entering the soul of someone else?”

I think, though, that Poetic Justice is ultimately more admirable in its ambition than its execution. The emotional crescendo via the “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” means that Poetic Justice peaks too early. Though this is not for lack of trying. Singleton attempts to incorporate a host of social issues—AIDS, alcoholism, freebasing, single parenthood, police harassment, gun violence (the opening scene at a drive-in, during which Justice’s boyfriend is shot and killed, seems to directly reference and humanize the tragedies of the theater shootings that occurred at various screenings of Boyz n the Hood)—but with too light a hand. What were intended to be realistic elements woven into the film’s backdrop are actually just glossed over, a fact underscored by how much time his characters spend just sitting around in a mail truck.

The road trip scenes are fraught with crabbiness. Iesha and Chicago fight and fuck and fight (their tension ultimately results in domestic violence, another pinged issue), and Justice and Lucky bicker for much of the first half of their association. While it was novel at the time for Jackson to be saying “fuck” so much, given the squeaky cleanness of her pre-janet. image, Jackson’s continued use of profanity and sexual frankness in the decades since have neutralized the power this scene once had:

And without the sense of novelty of casting Jackson against type, Poetic Justice is rendered flatter and far less exciting than it was upon its release. In fact, that might have been evident very early on. Poetic Justice opened to a healthy $11.7 million its first weekend in theaters after it was released July 23, 1993, but ended up with a cumulative domestic gross of just $27.5 million, about $30 million less than Boyz’s.

Still, it’s nice to revisit Shakur’s deftly versatile turn as a charming young man with prickish tendencies and ultimately a heart of gold. A not-so-fun fact: Singleton and others behind the scenes requested that he get an AIDS test before kissing Jackson onscreen, which was rumored to be at her request, though Shakur stated, “I don’t know if it’s Janet that it came from.” He found it insulting and refused.

And without Poetic Justice, we may never have had janet., at least not in its finished form. “When the movie was complete, I suppose I did want to shed some of Justice’s physical frustration,” she told Rolling Stone. “Rhythm Nation was a heavy record, and Poetic Justice was a heavy movie. I wanted to do something lighter but also daring. Mostly, though, I wanted to do something that corresponded to my life. My concepts are never bright ideas; they’re never notions I think will sell or be trendy or attract new fans. I don’t think that way. All I can do is sing from my life. When I wrote the album, I was still in a poetic frame of mind, inspired by Maya’s beautiful language. You can hear that inspiration on the interludes and especially on the song ‘New Agenda’ This time I felt much freer expressing myself.”

With her collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Janet developed “Again” specifically for Poetic Justice when a ballad was requested for the film’s soundtrack. (However, though “Again” plays at the end of the movie, it was not included on the film’s soundtrack album.) “Again” has been criticized for being treacly and for its melodrama that includes audible weeping from Janet, but I always thought it captured her delicate sweetness well.

The janet. train kept going after Poetic Justice. Jackson’s seminal artistic expression of sexual awakening spawned several more singles, including “Again,” which was finally released that fall, months after Poetic Justice had come and gone. Jackson’s film debut was ultimately a blip in an otherwise astonishing run of releases that managed to synthesize expression and commercialism into an impossible-to-ignore statement of sexual and artistic agency.

One of the best scenes in Poetic Justice, in fact, subverts most of the presented content. The traveling foursome come across a family reunion that they crash and it breaks their collective funk. For a fleeting moment, in a park surrounded by Black people, there is true joy. And then subverting that is a monologue from Maya Angelou herself (as Aunt June) on the irresponsibility of kids today with our heroes as her main target.

It’s exaggerated, sure (I love the side-eye veteran actor Norma Donaldson gives Angelou as she rants), but the older I get, the truer this sounds. I don’t know if that means the movie is aging well or I’m just aging, but either way, this checks out.