Warning: This story contains spoilers for Highest 2 Lowest.
Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee’s latest film, marks his fifth collaboration with fellow Oscar winner Denzel Washington, and their first film together in 19 years, after 2006’s Inside Man. The film is “not a remake, but a reinterpretation,” Lee is careful to clarify, of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low, itself an adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel King’s Ransom. Lee’s film moves that film’s post-war Japanese setting to contemporary New York City, which has served as the backdrop for many of his most famous movies. It’s a film infused with Lee’s personal passions of New York, the Knicks, the Yankees, and music. In fact, in Highest 2 Lowest, it’s all about the music.
Washington plays David King, a powerful music executive whose life is turned upside down when he receives a phone call that his son Tyler (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped, and if King wants to see him again, he’ll need to pay a $17.5 million ransom. The stakes are heightened from there, especially when Tyler returns home unscathed and his family learns that the kidnappers accidentally took the son of King’s confidant and closest friend, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright). If King gives away $17.5 million to save his friend’s son, it means giving up his dream of buying back a controlling stake in his record company and taking back ownership of the music he loves so much. If he doesn’t—and, in fact, even the fact that he’s considering the possibility of not doing it—he has to confront some difficult moral truths about the kind of man he is.
Lee spoke to TIME about the twists and turns of its powerful ending. Highest 2 Lowest is currently playing in theaters and will hit Apple TV+ on Sept. 5.
Read more: With Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee Gives Us Another Great New York Movie
King and Christopher take justice into their own hands
After a night of soul-searching, King ultimately agrees to help Christopher and pay the ransom for Kyle (played by Wright’s real-life son, Elijah Wright). Following the kidnapper’s instructions, King is to complete the handoff on the subway, then members of the police will try to apprehend the kidnappers and help recover the backpack with the money, which has a tracking device in it. The handover of the $17.5 million is a partial success, as Kyle (Elijah Wright) is rescued, badly beaten but poised to recover. But the money itself is taken by the kidnappers, who outsmart the police by orchestrating a criss-crossing brigade of masked motorcyclists playing catch with the backpack.
Later at the hospital, the police question Kyle about what he experienced during the kidnapping. The only detail he can recall is a song that he heard over and over while in captivity. King’s so-called best ear in the music industry allows him eventually to recognize the snippet of music Kyle references—it’s a track by a rapper named Yung Felon (ASAP Rocky), who King had previously turned down for a record deal. Finally, we have the identity of the person behind the kidnapping, and a motive—a rapper scorned by King. King presents this information to the authorities, who dismiss his amateur sleuthing tactics. So King and Christopher decide they have no choice but to take things into their own hands when it comes to recovering the money.
A contact of Christopher’s knows Yung Felon, so the pair head to his home address in the Bronx. Arriving at his modest apartment (numbered A24, a nod to the production company and the film’s distributor), they find Felon’s girlfriend Rosa (Princess Nokia), who, clearly unaware of the kidnapping scheme, couldn’t be more excited to see King. She lets him in, and talks about how excited Felon would be to meet him. She reveals that Felon worships the ground he walks on and even named their child after him. King notices she’s wearing the Balmain bracelet he gave his wife for an anniversary, which Felon had demanded be included along with the ransom money. Rosa then gives King the address to his studio, unaware of the reason for his visit.
A Western-inspired showdown in the recording studio
In the basement studio, we follow an armed King to a confrontation in the recording booth with Felon, the man who tried to kidnap his son and stole $17.5 million from him just to get his attention (which kind of worked, after all). King sits behind the glass as Felon stands behind the mic, and things get heated. King is trying to make sense of everything; if all Felon wanted was his attention, why take things to such extremes? Cinema is no stranger to obsessed fans: Kathy Bates in Misery is perhaps the most famous example, but in an age where social media allows us to feel closer and more connected with the artists we adore, Highest 2 Lowest highlights an extreme example of the uneasy bond between fan and celebrity. “We did put a twist on it,” Lee says. That comes through in Felon and King’s relationship from a business standpoint. Felon isn’t just a fan, but someone who can offer King mutual success through a big record deal. Ostensibly, they’re would-be peers in the same industry.
Lee’s own concern with the way phones and social media have taken over particularly young people’s lives comes through in an early scene in which King pleads with his son Tyler to put his phone away so he can talk to him. “I don’t want to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but I’m going to. It’s not a good thing,” Lee says. “I don’t think it’s physically or mentally healthy for our young adults to be on the phone 10-15 hours a day. There’s no way it could be good.”
Lee also points to another element of the film that he thinks people may not have considered. “In this film, Deznel’s character really has two sons. He has his own son and Felon. Even crazier, ASAP Rocky looks like he could be Denzel’s son. We play with that in the movie,” Lee says. “Even five years ago, people said ASAP looks like he’s Denzel’s son. We don’t try and run from that. In a lot of ways, it’s a father-son dilemma, not with King’s real son, but with his non-biological son, Yung Felon.”
In this climactic recording-studio scene, the camera darts between King and Felon: “We turn it into a Western: High Noon,” Lee says of the inspiration for the intense showdown. This tense standoff has a rhythmic quality to it, so much so that both King and Felon begin to deliberately rhyme. The tension is broken by Felon, who, startled, asks, “What is this, a rap battle?” “I ain’t no rapper, I’m a chance giver,” King responds, but it is most definitely a rap battle, albeit one in which either of the participants could pull the trigger at any moment.
“A lot of the recording studio was ad-libbed. A lot of that rap battle wasn’t written in the script. A lot of times, you don’t know what Denzel is gonna do, and he turned into Nas spitting the Illmatic. He was quoting Nas, and that did not deter Rocky. He rode right with it. They were trading bars back and forth that weren’t written. It lifted the scene into the heights,” Lee says.
Paying homage with the subway confrontation
Things come crashing back to Earth when a furious Felon shoots at King through the glass and runs out of the booth. King pursues him to the subway at 161st St. It’s the second thrilling face-off on a New York City subway car in Highest 2 Lowest. The subway has long been a point of fascination for Lee, who cites William Friedkin’s The French Connection as an inspiration.
“That masterpiece starts at a subway station, Bay 50th St., and that was the subway for my high school, John Dewey, in Coney Island. They didn’t have a permit to film there. They just did it bootleg, and luckily nobody got killed. They were shooting that scene while I was in class! And no one knew about it until we saw the film: ‘Oh sh-t, they shot this while we were in class!’ If we’d known, we would have cut class to watch,” Lee says. “I’m a cinephile, and I like to give homage to great scenes. There’s also a reference to The Defiant Ones.”
Lee also notes that High and Low had an “amazing” and pivotal scene on a bullet train. “We had to step it up,” says Lee. King’s pursuit of Felon leads him running through the subway, but he’s unable to find Felon. That’s because Felon is riding on the top of the train, and he jumps down to attack King in between subway cars—the same place King lost the $17.5 million during the exchange. King gets the upper hand, and in a moment of desperation, Felon begs King to end his life. But King has no intention of letting Felon die: “You’ve got a son named after me!” King shouts, kicking Felon three times in frustration. King had his moral foundation tested when deciding to put up the ransom for Christopher’s son; this time he won’t hesitate to, well, do the right thing. Despite everything Felon has put him through and taken from him, he cannot bring himself to let another man fall to his death.
Eventually, the police apprehend Felon and find all of King’s money hidden under Felon’s bed, much to the shock of his girlfriend. The kidnapping scandal makes Felon an international name and catapults his existing music up the charts. On the day of the trial, hundreds of Felon’s fans wait outside the courthouse, pleading for his freedom and asserting his innocence. It’s at the courthouse that King discovers Felon has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, but that doesn’t satisfy him: “Not enough,” King says.
Daddy issues and a fresh start
Suddenly, in one of Highest 2 Lowest’s biggest surprises, we cut to Felon performing in the style of a music video—though that’s a term Lee likes to avoid. “Michael Jackson told me to never call what we do music videos. Call them short films,” says Lee. Either way, suddenly having Felon perform in prison garb is a bold and unexpected stylistic choice. Like everything Lee does, it has a specific purpose. “In Yung Felon’s mind, this was his short film he was going to make with King once he gets out of the hoosegow. It’s entirely his imagination,” Lee says.
This leads to a final confrontation between King and Felon, this time in prison. Framed similarly to the recording booth rap battle, they sit on either side of the glass. It’s here that Felon lays everything on the table, asking King to sign him to a record deal. Felon shares that he has reached over 1 billion streams since his arrest and tells King that “attention is the greatest currency.” To that, King responds, “All money ain’t good money.” King doesn’t hesitate to refuse Felon’s offer, telling him, “I can’t do nothing with your music. It’s not for me.” Felon is furious and flies at the glass to try and attack King, but he’s apprehended by police and thrown back into his cell.
Though it’s a victorious moment for King, who has everything he could want, there’s an undercurrent of melancholy in Felon. “What Felon sees in King is the father he didn’t have. King asks him, ‘What about your dad?’ Felon says, ‘F-ck him.’ He didn’t have a father. If you don’t have a father at home, you seek one in other places. At the end, he idolizes David King—that’s his father figure. He’s the father Felon didn’t have growing up in Harlem,” Lee says. This explains Felon’s childish behavior when rejected by King, leading to his violent outburst. For Felon, he’s being told by the father figure he’s longed for his whole life that he wants nothing to do with him.
It’s also a big moment for King. He has the opportunity to become rich beyond his wildest dreams if he works with Felon, but he sticks to his morals above easy money. “I think the way Denzel played it, and the way I see it, is there’s a right and wrong. That’s why the line he says in the moment is on the poster: ‘All money ain’t good money,’” Lee says. King has come full circle and returned to his passion: making great music. He’s left the major label he grew from the ground up to go independent, and with his wife and son by his side, he takes an audition in their apartment to find the next great artist. “He’s getting back to the roots of the music,” Lee says.
It’s here we’re introduced to Sula (Aiyana-Lee), the artist Tyler told his father about at the beginning of the film. She performs the film’s title track, “Highest 2 Lowest,” a powerhouse ballad about embracing integrity and how good it feels to follow your heart and not let anyone deter you from your goals, which seamlessly fits the overall message of the film. King is blown away by her performance. He asks if she can handle everything that’s about to come her way with fame, and she enthusiastically says she’s ready. “Let’s get to work,” King says with a smile, ending the film.
“Early on in the film, his wife tells him she doesn’t see the joy he had at the beginning of his career,” Lee says. “At the end, King regains that. He’s starting with a brand new label. It’s small, but he’s gonna do it the way that feels good when his head lies on the pillow at night. He’s at peace. All money ain’t good money!”
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