TV Preview: Peter Marks on Spike Lee's Musical 'Passing Strange: The Movie'

Spike Lee's eye proves both a benevolent and beneficial addition to the imaginative canvas of "Passing Strange," the buoyant coming-of-age musical that last year introduced Broadway audiences to the rock troubadour Stew.

The cinematography and editing are superb in Lee's effervescent film version -- called "Passing Strange: The Movie" -- which is unveiled Wednesday on a new on-demand cable service, Sundance Selects, available locally on Comcast. His refined documentary style is put to such good use that the movie gives hope to those who long for an invigoration of technique in the recording of musicals on film.

An intensely personal account of a young musician's shedding his past to find his voice, "Passing Strange," which closed on Broadway last summer, was, in its stage incarnation, focused to a large degree on the sung-and-spoken narration of the charismatic Stew himself. (He wrote the book and lyrics and, with Heidi Rodewald, the music, too.) In Lee's approach to filming the musical's final performance at the Belasco Theatre, he has managed to underline the more collaborative aspects of the evening without detracting from Stew's galvanizing role at the center of it.

The musical, an attempt to bottle the fervent search of its young songwriter-hero -- called "Youth" and ably portrayed by Daniel Breaker -- felt at times a little too chaotic onstage. Performed on a bare rectangular platform, with the band members ensconced in sunken niches on all sides, the satiric show hopscotched from the Youth's home town of Los Angeles in the mid-'70s to his embrace of the avant-garde in Amsterdam and Berlin. In Europe, he pursues a dream of becoming an artist for an age of intense self-scrutiny, only to discover that he's yet to fully come to terms with his own history and identity.

What became overshadowed somewhat by Stew's ebullient storytelling was the power of the dramatic sequences, as acted by Breaker and a quartet of protean supporting players. Lee's restless camera is instrumental in providing more narrative balance; now, as the lens narrows our focus to specific faces, we watch more raptly as the show's biographical sequences, touching or caustic, unfold. The characters seem to have more license to exude personality; the close-ups in the scenes between the Youth and his mother (the excellent Eisa Davis), for example, allow you to feel the story's tensions more urgently -- and to see "Passing Strange" as far more than an embellished concert.

You can feel Lee's appreciation of Stew, and of the project: His cameras stay on during intermission, for a brief peek backstage, as the performers prepare for the second act. The sequence is a loving kind of eavesdropping that captures something about the breathless progression of live performance, the audience's eternal curiosity about the rarefied air of the stage.

Lee's generous embrace feels at one with the freshness of the material. The eclectic rock score by Stew and Rodewald -- she's also a band member -- draws on a variety of influences, from punk to def poetry. At times the songs are parodies; at others they strike deeply moving chords. The ease with which the film navigates the musical's moods and stylings may, in fact, do some greater good for Broadway. It could compel the most resolute skeptics to a belief that the Great White Way can be a sanctuary of cool.

Passing Strange: The Movie (135 minutes) debuts Wednesday on the Sundance Selects cable service, available on Comcast.