DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY

In 2005, Dave Chappelle abandoned the third season of his smash hit Comedy Central series, turned down a $50 million deal and fled for Africa. Was he crazy? Paranoid? On drugs? These were the questions from the press he returned to and despite his protests, once he began to recede from public life the story seemed to become that Dave Chappelle had lost both his best shot at greatness and his mind.

In answering the question of why Chappelle chose to leave his show, there is perhaps no more enlightening document than the concert film he made the year before with Michel Gondry, Dave Chappelle's Block Party. It is also an excellent document of Chappelle's passion and humanity, something which was overshadowed upon its release in 2006 by the controversy surrounding his escape from stardom.

The film begins in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the unlikely place Dave Chappelle calls home. Yellow Springs is where he spent his childhood, but as he gleefully traverses the town, handing out tickets and chatting up its residents, it's easy to see why he came back. He pays a visit to a shop whose salesperson remarks to the camera that, despite his fame and fortune, she treats Dave like any other customer, a fact which Chappelle cites as an example of why he lives there in the first place.

The tickets are to a "block party", which is more like a one-day dream music festival, what Chappelle calls "the concert [he] always wanted to see". Chappelle hosts his block party in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, which is (depending on who you ask) one of the likeliest candidates as the birthplace of hip-hop. Blocks from where Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls and many of the film's own performers grew up, there seems to be no more fitting a location for the concert.

Among the strange scenery of the neighborhood is the "Broken Angel House", owned by an eccentric couple united by premonition to renovate the decaying building into some kind of inner-city funhouse. The couple's story is interesting, but the long stretch of the film centered on them and the house (with only that minimal payoff towards the end of the film) seems to be an indulgence of Gondry, though this is purely speculation. Otherwise, little would indicate that Gondry was responsible for the film, besides the occasional stylistic cue, like the playfully animated opening credits sequence. This is a good thing; Gondry is a fine director but his surrealist style would seem ill-suited to a hip-hop concert film, and thankfully he seems to approach the project with a certain personal distance.

On a wet afternoon a few days past the film's starting point, the golden ticket recipients from Yellow Springs and hundreds of internet-alerted fans board buses aimed at Brooklyn, mostly unaware of what to expect from the day. The line-up, as it turns out, is just as superb as Chappelle promised: Kanye West, The Roots, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Common, Dead Prez, the miraculously reunited Fugees, and more.

Kanye is on first. It was discussed in class whether he would have been first up today like he was in 2004. I'm inclined to agree that he would have. His star power and his ego were already large by then but he was amongst a group of people who he must have had the utmost respect for, and called there by the man who'd put him on TV performing for the first time the same year. One of the film's many magical moments is seeing the college marching band Chappelle brought from Yellow Springs performing "Jesus Walks" for an excited Kanye.

The performances throughout the day are stunning. Mos Def and Talib Kweli naturally jump in and out of each others' impressive sets. Dead Prez play a blistering set while Chappelle talks about his desire to put controversial but honest artists in the forefront. Erykah Badu gives a powerful performance, stripping off her hair mid-song as Chappelle ruminates appropriately about the place where an artist's personal and private selves meet.

The performances throughout the film are presented without fuss, allowed enough space to breath but cleverly edited and weaved in with Chappelle's narrative and philosophy when appropriate. There's a palpable sense of fun to the entire thing. The Roots' Questlove heroically and improbably drums his way through every single performance, often with a smile on his face. In one memorable scene, he convinces Erykah Badu to emerge from backstage and duet spontaneously with Jill Scott on the Roots' "You Got Me".

As the Fugees perform at the end of the day–reunited for one night by Chappelle–Lauryn Hill asks the audience where they've been, only to be asked where she's been. "That's where I've been," she answers to the cameras, pointing to her infant son offstage. Like Dave, Hill disappeared from the public eye at the height of her success, bringing endless rumors and speculation. But the answer to where she's been is as simple and understandable as that. It was predictable to blame Chappelle's escape from stardom on any number of personal problems but the answer, like Lauryn Hill's, was much more logical and boring.

During his 2005 appearance on "Inside the Actor's Studio", in promotion of Block Party, Chappelle told the audience that he likes to connect with other people, and that money and fame require you to put up walls around yourself, something he never wanted to do. In Block Party, we see the simple joy Chappelle clearly gets from interacting with people and making them happy, and it becomes clear why he was so afraid of losing it. Besides infrequent stand-up appearances and an occasional interview, Block Party was Chappelle's last creative endeavor to see release since he left his show. I'm sure it's not the last we've seen of him, but I can't help but think that however he's spending his time out of the spotlight, he's enjoying it.