‘The Get Down’ Is A Bold, Beautiful New York City Fairy Tale

Tomorrow Netflix will finally unveil the first six episodes of The Get Down. Baz Luhrmann‘s electric ode to the dawn of hip hop has had to overcome its fair share of hurdles: Showrunners quit, budgets somersaulted out of control, and now the reviews are fairly mixed. Our own Joe Reid argued in his review that its ambition is its greatest flaw. The Get Down‘s pilot is a frenetic fantasy that might not jive with what people expect out of TV, but it fits snugly into Luhrmann’s oeuvre of cinematic fairy tales.

Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann is at his best when he’s spinning life’s mundane moments into magic. Consider the “Time After Time” number in Strictly Ballroom: a potentially awkward rooftop dance becomes a dreamy spell into fantasy with an orchestral swell and a glittering Coca-Cola billboard. It’s a turning point for the film that grounds every bonkers moment before and after with a simple, earnest romance. He’s not so good when he lets his imagination and budget run away from him and loses the central emotions running through the plot (think the bloated parts of The Great Gatsby and practically all of Australia).

Luhrmann’s also not-so-subtly obsessed with fairy tales. Strictly Ballroom is a hybrid of David & Goliath and the Ugly Duckling while Moulin Rouge! was loosely inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Dumas’ oft-imitated Camille. Besides tackling the most epic love story in literature — Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet — he’s also tried in vain to bring the most American of modern legends, The Great Gatsby, to life. Oddly, he was most off his game when trying to forge a new mythology for his own nation in Australia. But where does The Get Down fit in? It’s his interpretation of yet another great American fairy tale: “The Dream of New York City.”

Okay, so it’s not a story that’s been translated from Hans Christian Andersen or written in our American literature. But “The Dream of New York City” is an intangible myth that has popped up in just about every 20th century story about showbusiness from Funny Girl to Fame, Center Stage to even, darkly, Black Swan. Its ethos is even at the core of Hamilton. It’s the idea that the poorest kid in the city can rise up and become a titan with hard work, creative genius, and quite a bit of luck. Ezekiel “Books” Figuero (Justice Smith) and his starry-eyed lady love Mylene (Herizen Guardiola) are inspired by their own dreams of hip hop and disco stardom. Thanks to the show’s framing device, we know that one of them will wind up on top, and thanks to history, we know the other is tying their dreams to a dying art form.

The Get Down sets itself up as a dreamy look at a New York City that never quite existed in real life. To set the stage, the Ezekiel of the ’90s narrates the story like a hip hop Greek chorus. We see grainy news footage of the horrors of the ’70s: The Son of Sam, Bronx in rubble, crumbling buildings. Not only are these images iconic, but they come with a gritty, crunchy celluloid gauze that defines footage shot in that time. However, when Luhrmann presents those same scenes in the playground of The Get Down, the colors are blown out to be technicolor and bright. Everything, from the editing, to the lighting, to the soundtrack, is ratcheted up to a fever pitch. It is the larger-than-life fairy tale world of youth; A place full of literally glittering dreams and real-life monsters living in the dark. This is Luhrmann’s thesis: Even the Bronx can be home to cackling crones, child soldiers, scheming demons, and an upstart hero and his enigmatic mentor.

Let’s talk about Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore) for a moment. The aspiring DJ might parkour through the streets like a hip hop ninja, but he’s an Obi-Wan Kenobi figure to the young Books (whose friends, yes, are obsessed with Star Wars). He pulls the orphan boy out of the ordinary world and into a bright new universe where the boy is a legend in the making. His heroism is defined by his costume of choice: a blend of James Dean’s white shirt and red jacket from Rebel Without a Cause and Michael Jackson’s iconic jacket still to come. He is a warrior and a cleric, an artist and a brawler. As a mentor, he is one of the most mythological parts of the story.

Books himself gets a bit of mythologic polish. He’s an orphan — always an auspicious start for heroes — and he’s a poet. He’s David with the lyre, a preternaturally-gifted young man destined for greatness, but doomed to stand in his own way. Mylene is the good girl torn between the world of heaven (her father’s church) and literal hell (Les Inferno). Luhrmann might be playing the Orpheus myth again here, but it works because these myths, legends, and fairy tales are the stories that help us understand our deepest dreams and most unwieldy emotions.

The Get Down does indeed have a big heart and it has a big aim, too. It wants to bring the New York City fairy tale to the often overlooked Bronx, cast a rapper as a hero, and a disco diva-wannabe as a princess in a brownstone tower. It wants to argue that art and beauty and music and poetry aren’t just the things that make our lives better, but that they are the weapons we have to defeat our inner demons and to become the heroes of our own lives. The Get Down wants you to believe in the magic that’s already right in front of you.

[The Get Down premieres on Netflix tomorrow]

[Photos: Netflix]