"Dave Chappelle's Block Party"

And Chappelle is always on the sidelines, drinking it all in, clearly proud that he's been able to pull the whole thing together. Whether he's goofing around with friends like the extraordinary actor and rapper Mos Def (who himself grew up in Bed-Stuy) or sitting down at a Salvation Army piano to map out a surprisingly delicate and moving version of "'Round Midnight" (it's one of only two songs he knows how to play -- the other is "Misty" -- and as the Roots' ?uestlove marvels, he's one of these guys who's "not a musician, but has devoted his whole life to 'Round Midnight'"), Chappelle is always the driving, and unifying, force behind "Block Party." He tells jokes that aren't particularly funny: "Did you hear the one about the industrious prostitute?" But the punch lines, even the lamest ones, make you laugh anyway, simply because Chappelle's timing is so remarkably perfect, without ever being rigid or predictable. His beats are marvelously elastic, but they snap when they need to. You know he's not kidding when he explains that he learned about timing from listening to Thelonious Monk, whose woozy musical punch lines always hit their target.

The camera gets a charge just from the look of Chappelle: In the early minutes of the movie, we see him prancing about with a bullhorn, announcing the details of his upcoming concert to us and to the world, a gangly cheerleader at an improvised pep rally. Chappelle has no butt: He's all joints and limbs, a lanky puppet on invisible strings. Later, he'll use that same bullhorn while driving down one of the tonier streets of what I'm almost sure is Brooklyn's Fort Greene, his rallying cry of "Attention, Huxtables!" echoing down a canyon of exquisitely renovated brownstones.

Chappelle's humor is unabashedly racial, though not racist; he seems to get that erasing differences isn't the answer, and it isn't even desirable. He spends some time talking to an aged white hippie couple who own an outlandish (and amazing) churchlike building right near the spot where the concert will take place. They tell a fairly wild story about how their house got its name, "Broken Angel," which is painted in swooping letters on its facade.

Chappelle listens to their story as the camera takes in the spectacle of their appearance: The woman is dressed in gauzy, water-colored layers, even though she's well past 60; the man, an elfin presence, is dressed in a simply tailored dark jacket whose shoulders are flanked with a vivid rainbow design. They tell Chappelle that they're about to celebrate their 46th wedding anniversary, and he listens attentively.

Chappelle doesn't pretend he isn't amused by this somewhat eccentric pair of lovebirds -- it's impossible not to be struck by their quaint mannerisms and odd expressions. (At one point the woman explains that she wants to marry Rachmaninoff -- after she's dead, of course, because death is the only thing that will render her current marriage vows null and void.) But he doesn't mock these people, not even when the woman explains that she dislikes hip-hop because she doesn't approve of "bad" language. His America has room for the lady in Ohio who works in the store where he buys his cigarettes (she confesses that, out of respect for his privacy, she had always pretended she didn't know who he was, even as she was screaming to herself, "It's Dave Chappelle!"), as well as for the old hippies who may not like his taste in music but who are nonetheless happy to support his little "happening."

At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, "Dave Chappelle's Block Party" feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism. This is what Dave Chappelle's America looks like, and now that we get the idea, there's no reason we can't live in it too.

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