You Probably Missed Spike Lee and Denzel Washington’s First Movie Together — But It Captures Both of Them at Their Best

While only making four films together, Spike Leeand Denzel Washingtonhave been one of the signature director-actor duos of the last 30 years, with both reaching the apex of their abilities while together. Along with being prominent faces of Black cinema, Lee and Washington complement each other's interests in tense, dramatic storytelling, sharp humor, tactful theatricality, and confrontational social commentary. Before their most iconic collaborations, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Inside Man, and Highest 2 Lowest (set to release in 2025), Washington's debut team-up with Lee, red-hot after the critical sensation of Do the Right Thing, saw him playing a brilliant but troubled jazz musician in Mo' Better Blues. Like all Spike Lee joints, the 1990 film is not bound by one genre or style, but its reflection of the inherent egoism and personal self-destruction of an artist is the closest that Lee has ever gotten to pouring his own doubts and insecurities onto celluloid.