Critics reviews

As a director, Harris himself is something of a chameleon, joining his incisive vision to disruptive narrative techniques borrowed from Frank Tashlin, the French New Wave, and television comedy. He endows Street with his own vast cultural range, stretching from Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau to pop music and TV. The result is a disarming, disturbing, elusive, and profound meditation on personal identity. Shockingly, Harris hasn't yet made another film.

The qualities that persuaded the [Sundance] jury are evident on the first watch. Episodic in structure, with a bone-dry, basso-profondo narration from Harris himself as Street, it's a complex examination of the interplay of race, identity and economics as refracted through its ambiguous subject. It's also hilariously funny in places, thanks to Juilliard graduate Harris's exquisite comic timing and gift for delivering his self-penned screenplay's near-incessant flood of dextrous wordplay.

The achievement here echoes early De Palma, Melvin Van Peebles, and Robert Downey Sr. at his fiercest... The filmmaking can be sloppy (flubbed lines, heart-shaped iris-outs), and none of Harris Jr.'s costars are near his preternatural level, but these are excused by the sheer wealth of the film and lead's magnetism. The screenplay is so clever that a line like, "This marriage has gone sour—sour like cottage cheese gone bad" is a joke on the reaching quality of most similes.

Throughout, Harris deploys Street's story with formidable narrative economy and formal invention, including Godardian narrative ruptures and jackknife shifts in tone from Swiftian satire to George Romero-like horror show. It remains one of the standout American movies of the 1990s.

The film's crude, cheap visuals wield a sharp double edge — take them either as botch work or as the opportunistic parody of blaxploitation filmmaking and those films' disturbed sense of empowerment and social dynamics. Burdened by tons of Street's seriously witless summary judgments and smooth romantic seduction-chat, "Chameleon Street" remains probing and singular, and perhaps, an opportunity for a less indulgent, more thoroughly conceived remake.

Without wasting any time on facile psychologizing, Harris uses his subject as a means to explore the paradoxes of acting (some of Street's real-life victims play themselves) and the invisibility of blacks in the U.S.; Street is also the source of some very funny comedy. In all, this disturbing yet compelling rogue's progress calls to mind an 18th-century picaresque novel. Harris's eclectic directorial style doesn't always sustain itself, but it's brimming with inventive ideas.