He includes his short film “3 Brothers,” which splices the murder of Radio Raheem, from “Do the Right Thing,” with the killings of Garner and Floyd. Because little of the documentary is based on his own shots, Lee imposes himself on archival material. His series includes cell-phone videos of the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, and others. He is in an ambient argument with activists and critics who question the phenomenon of the viral lynching video. Lee is drawn to the truthtelling value of violent found footage to him, paying respect to the dead requires the spectacle of putting on a wake. But our trust in our home-town ambassador is further tested. The second episode’s appraisal of Trump is obsessive rather than illuminating, but viewers will likely forgive Lee’s digressions on the basis of liberal good will. Lee has attention to spare, but he does not have infinite time, and so threads are frustratingly dropped. After that, the actor Jeffrey Wright is explaining an initiative by Fort Greene restaurateurs to feed first responders. A few minutes later, we are meeting Ron Kim, a state assemblyman from Queens and a target of Andrew Cuomo’s bullying. One minute, we are watching an affecting tribute to Margaret Holloway, the “Shakespeare Lady” of New Haven, a beloved and misunderstood street performer who died of COVID. The first two episodes, on COVID-19 and the Trump Presidency, ricochet from story to montage to interview to speculation. He’s a bit tortured by his city’s suffering, and he yearns to do cinematic justice to every social injustice. (Like that native son, Lee is a social critic.) Being in the eye of the storm, Lee can’t disambiguate its wider effects. “I wouldn’t want to be any other place in the world but here, the epicenter,” Lee says, in an interview, sounding not unlike Chris Rock at the mike. By comparison, the muckraker of “NYC Epicenters” is a scattered man, spun out of orbit by his outrage. “4 Little Girls” and “When the Levees Broke,” his operatic visits to historical events distant and recent, stand alongside his dramas “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X” as his finest, most controlled work. Lee has rightly noted that his documentaries are underappreciated. Sometimes you need the showman and not the priest to m.c. The occasional Knicks joke puts his subjects, survivors of trauma, at ease. Early frames show Donald Trump in March, 2020, boasting about the country’s indomitability against the coronavirus underneath, a caption in large red type reads “President Agent Orange.” Later, Lee introduces Chris Cooper, the black birder who was targeted by Amy Cooper in Central Park, as “Harvard Edumucated.” As an interviewer, he’s avuncular. (More on that final chapter later.) These chapters are held together not so much by theme as by pungency. He has also mined the film canon for off-kilter references-often to his own œuvre-and collaged all this into four episodes divided into two chapters apiece, each of which is roughly an hour long, with the exception of the last. Lee has conducted two hundred interviews, rooted around for decades’ worth of television-news ephemera, and surfaced upsetting footage of catastrophe and corruption. The documentary is not just visceral but a kind of viscera: Lee’s thought process enfleshed. Unpredictably, the director splays himself across its seven and a half hours, offering up his messiness and his provincialism in equal proportion to his brilliance and his sensitivity. You can watch “NYC Epicenters” as a raw paean to the unbreakable city, but you can also watch it as a twilight retrospective of Lee by Lee. The ego is all there in the informality of the title, which gives off the weird gravitas of an epiphany scribbled in the Notes app. He wants to have you in his custody from the moment you learn the name of the “joint.” It is possible that, among all of Lee’s projects, “NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021 ½,” an oral history for HBO, reveals the most about his mammoth political and aesthetic appetites, in part because of its mammoth subject: twenty-first-century New York City, his home and muse. Spike Lee cannot wait for the picture to begin.
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