When Craig Brewer’s “Hustle & Flow” hit theaters in July 2005 it felt like an insurgent burst of Memphis — rough, funny, soulful and defiantly local. Two decades later the film still resonates. It launched careers, won an Academy Award for a Memphis rap group and turned a raw club track into a civic rallying cry.
Two decades later, the movie reads like a compact cultural time capsule that keeps giving back to the city that inspired it.
To mark the milestone, a 20th anniversary screening will be shown Thursday, Sept. 25, at Crosstown Theater followed by a conversation with Brewer and Memphis rap legend Al Kapone, the voice behind “Whoop That Trick.” Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the film starts at 7 p.m.
Brewer described the project to early backers not as a sensational “pimp movie,” but as something more human: “this street-hustling pimp who wants to make a recording studio out of the back of his shotgun house.” That line — blunt and specific — gets at what made the film different: It wasn’t glamorizing the lifestyle so much as charting a small-scale creative quest born of desperation and a search for dignity…