‘Once Again’ (for the very first time)’: Tallinn Review

Dir/scr: Boaz Yakin. US. 2023. 117mins

A famous street dancer and a young spoken word poet explore their pasts – both together and apart – and the possibility of a joint future in this unconventional and experimental urban collage of choreography, rap battles and vividly surreal imagery, set against the backdrop of a heightened New York city. It is a striking departure for writer-director Boaz Yakin, an unapologetically uncommercial work from a director whose previous films include the Denzel Washington sports biopic Remember The Titans, Jason Statham action vehicle Safe and Renee Zellweger drama A Price Above Rubies. (Yakin also co-wrote Jeymes Samuel’s Black Western The Harder They Fall.)

Unconventional and experimental urban collage 

There are also no star names to act as marketing hooks: Jeroboam Bozeman, who plays the lead role of street dance legend DeRay, is a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre; Mecca ’Meccamorphosis’ Verdell, as the poet Naima, is a multi-award-winning spoken word poet and actor. Both are clearly accomplished in their fields but this does not always translate to on-screen chemistry between them. Once Again (for the very first time) is uneven, certainly, and rather indulgent at times. But what the film does brilliantly is tap into the raw dynamism of the art forms it showcases. It is a perplexing and disorientating piece of storytelling but, throw yourself into the visceral energy that pulses from the screen, and it can be a thrilling experience.

The film is most successful, and most fiercely alive, when it allows its two central characters to communicate in the ways they know best. The film opens, for example, with a shot of DeRay plummeting from the sky and finding himself deposited in the hallway outside Naima’s apartment. A lyrical but impenetrable voice-over talks about the difference between being inside an ocean wave compared to viewing it from above. But it is not until DeRay starts to dance – a rage-filled battle against the tight walls of the corridor and the restrictions that box in his life – that we really begin to understand the man.

Both DeRay and Naima are survivors of trauma and/or guilt. It is suggested that, as a teenager, DeRay may have killed another boy, but the film is so steeped in poetic symbolism and imagery this may not literally be the case. Both channel their pain into their art and use their talents to survive in the war zone of the New York streets. This takes the form of street dance battles – superbly conceived by choreographer Rennie Harris but filmed restlessly and impatiently, in a way that does not always do justice to the artistry of the performers.

Naima, meanwhile, holds her own in a spoken word contest which amounts to little more than trading rhyming insults, but excels in two scenes in which she performs solo, to an unseen crowd. Here, she is electrifying – there’s a power in the simplicity of these scenes that is missing in Yakin’s more surreal and symbolic flourishes which include the somewhat overused images of cascading showers of blood and characters falling from the sky.