On paper, it had a certain Mad Libs quality to it: the Tribeca film festival programmed a fiftieth anniversary screening of downtown classic Mean Streets, with star and festival co-founder Robert De Niro on hand for a Q&A along with director Martin Scorsese – the curveball being that those questions were asked by none other than rapper, lifelong New Yorker, and evident film buff Nas.
The seeming incongruence faded away pretty quickly, and not just when Nas recalled shooting his Street Dreams music video as scrupulous homage to the Scorsese/De Niro joint Casino. (“Growing up, Goodfellas taught us a lot,” he added. “It was helpful.”) He set the stage for the event by expressing everything Mean Streets means and has meant to him, part of the longstanding mutual admiration between gangster cinema and hip-hop. As a restless young man in search of a dollar wherever he could get it, he saw an aspirational figure in De Niro’s hot-tempered hustler Johnny Boy, and as a budding artist using the modest means available to convey his raw vision of authentic drama at street-level, he came to see himself in Scorsese. The film, released exactly one month after Nas’ birth, “taps into something fundamental about the city’s essence, the hustle, the spirit,” he said.
