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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Iceberg Slim: Portrait Of A Pimp

ICEBERG SLIM: PORTRAIT OF A PIMP (Jorge Hinojosa). 89 minutes. Opens Friday (August 16). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NNN


Once upon a time, a man named Robert Beck wrote a book called Pimp: The Story Of My Life.

Published in 1967, it was a revolutionary event, codifying underworld culture, introducing millions of readers to the idea of hustlers, hos and tricks and influencing the first generation of rappers and hip-hop artists.

Perhaps most daring of all was Beck’s use of his street name as a form of authority: Iceberg Slim.

Jorge Hinojosa’s Iceberg Slim: Portrait Of A Pimp is a fine talking-heads documentary that brings Beck’s legend to vivid life through testimonials from his publisher and family, as well

as archival footage of the man

himself. Hinojosa and executive

producer Ice-T – who took his name from Beck’s stone-cold street persona – tell Slim’s story in chronological order, from his youth as a petty criminal through his emergence as a counterculture author and ending with his ignominious death in 1992.

Given hip-hop culture’s tendency toward lionizing criminals, I was impressed by Hinojosa’s refusal to turn the film into a straight-up hagiography. Beck was a gifted writer but a pretty awful person, and the movie doesn’t back away from that. Neither is it as flashy nor as dynamic as its subject.

But really, what could be?

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