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Heaven on Earth

Lackawanna Blues sets unconditional love to music during the era of segregation. PHOTO COURTESY OF HBO

Holly Golightly’s cocktail party in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Dinner in Babette’s Feast.

The conga line, danced to Banana Boat Song in Beetlejuice.

The toga party in Animal House.

Some parties in movies are so inviting that viewers wish they could leap into the frame and join the madness. Lackawanna Blues opens with just that kind of evening: guests are drinking, eating and dancing at Nanny’s Friday night fish fry with the kind of infectious laughter and physical abandon that only people with hard lives can muster. This HBO film, to be shown Tuesday at 10pm, is set in a poor neighborhood of Lackawanna, New York and begins in 1956, a time when, as the narrator puts it, segregation forced blacks “to make their own heaven on Earth.’’

The jukebox in the parlor plays Boogie Woogie Country Girl by Big Joe Turner, as people teem through the house, dancing, chatting, smoking, drinking and eating under the hospitality of Rachel Crosby (S. Epatha Merkerson), an earth mother landlady who goes by the name of Nanny and sometimes Mama. When she is summoned to help a tenant who suddenly goes into labor, Nanny’s much younger husband, Bill (Terrence Dashon Howard), sneaks off to have sex with a party guest in the front seat of a car. The camera keeps switching from their lovemaking to the impromptu delivery, juxtaposing the girl’s screams of pleasure and the mother’s screams of pain until they meld into one.

It’s the fanciest scene in a film that is actually very simple: Lackawanna Blues, which originated as an autobiographical one-man show by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, consists of a string of vignettes paying tribute to the woman who raised him and took care of the misfits and misunderstood drifters in her community.

The film is a Hallmark movie with better music, an Under Milk Wood of segregation. But its poignancy is less in the portrait of a caring, nurturing woman than in its evocation of a lost world: a poor, rough, often violent neighborhood that held people together only to fall apart and vanish, closed down and boarded up, in the urban flight of the 1960s and 1970s.

And that window into a small, not particularly noteworthy moment in recent American history is rare, which helps explain the high-octane names behind the project: it was directed by George C. Wolfe; Halle Berry is one of the executive producers; Mos Def plays a bandleader and performs some of the music (his version of Louis Jordan’s Caldonia is reason enough to see the film); Louis Gossett Jr., Macy Gray and Jeffrey Wright play eccentric boarders; Liev Schreiber has a fleeting cameo as a disapproving social worker; Rosie Perez has an equally small role as a friend of Nanny’s; and Jimmy Smits plays the father of the boy Nanny takes in as her own.

The film has moments of sadness and heartache, and many treacly ones, hammered home by the blind singer Robert Bradley crooning the blues on sidewalks and backdoor stoops, but Lackawanna is at its best when it captures the fleeting joys of lost days. And one irresistible pleasure is the music and dancing at Maxie’s nightclub as the band plays Destination Love.

Lackawanna Blues premiers on HBO on Tuesday at 10pm.
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