"Dave Chappelle's Block Party"

You can read that as a snippet of disingenuous celebrity-speak, but I think, at the very least, it suggests that Chappelle has wrestled with the distinction between being a personality and a person. In "Block Party," he allows himself, comfortably, to be both, as if, perhaps, he saw the party as a kind of silver lining to the clouds that come with fame and money. Gondry's camera follows Chappelle around Yellow Springs, where he asks any number of people he runs into -- store clerks, teenagers who are just hanging out, elderly folk doing their errands, parole officers wearing stiff, white short-sleeved shirts -- "Do you like hip-hop?" He asks the question of everyone he sees, white or black, and age doesn't matter, either. This isn't a test of hipness; as much as Chappelle loves hip-hop himself, it's clear that he wouldn't think "no" was an unreasonable answer. But he has only a few dozen "golden tickets" to give out, each of which will entitle the bearer to transportation from Ohio to Brooklyn and back, as well as lodging, and he wants these tickets to go to people who'll appreciate them. One elderly gent, with an air of regret, says that the problem isn't that he doesn't like the music; it's just that he doesn't "hear well enough to catch the words." Another older woman laments that she can't go to Brooklyn because she has to go to Canada that weekend. "Canada!" Chappelle exclaims. "Tryin' to dodge the war?" The woman laughs because, well, how can you not?

And everyone Chappelle approaches -- for the most part these people are white, and older, not what you'd immediately think of as Chappelle's target demographic -- either accepts his invitation eagerly or sounds genuinely regretful at having to decline. Most excited of all may be Ohio's Central State University marching band, who, when they get the word that they've been granted permission to go to New York, begin screaming and jumping up and down as if they were on springs. (They'll have the honor of opening the show, accompanying Kanye West on an extraordinary, exhilarating version of his "Jesus Walks.")

"Block Party" is a rangy, open-hearted picture; its spirit is one of joyous inclusiveness, and I suspect it will open the eyes (and ears) of many people who claim not to like hip-hop, if only because it shows that the term is such a broad umbrella for a vast range of styles. Considering hip-hop is the biggest force in pop music today, I'm always surprised by the number of people I meet (most of them, admittedly, over 40 and white) who think it's all gangsta rap, and who, for that reason, have decided that they unilaterally don't like it -- which is a little like deciding you don't like abstract painting without ever having seen a Rauschenberg or a Pollock. Nearly all the performances in "Block Party" are vital and highly charged, even though they're also extremely varied. The simmering political frustration that courses through Dead Prez's numbers is a world apart from, say, the Fugees' accomplished but perhaps too studied version of "Killing Me Softly." Even so, it's remarkable to see all these performers brought together in one place, and it's easy enough to trace the threads between astonishing performers like Jill Scott (the spiritual daughter of Abbey Lincoln) and Erykah Badu (whose magnificent exploding-star afro is like a visual ode to Sly Stone).

Next page: "Attention, Huxtables!"