Ashley Walters, aka Asher D, was enjoying the drinks and canapés at a reception for fellow rising star Terrence Howard, in town to promote his new film Hustle & Flow. In it Howard portrays DJay, a small-time Memphis pimp who’s seeking to become something more by hustling his way into a career as a hip-hop artist. While in prison, DJay receives some news that seems to offer a way out.

“The same thing that happens to DJay happened to me,” Walters says. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I got the script for Bullet Boy. I saw this was something I could do when I got out and it turned my life around. I could so easily have gone down a different path.” Indeed, on the night of the party one of Walters’ former So Solid Crew colleagues was sentenced for murder. Walters, meanwhile, will be appearing with Howard in Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the biopic of 50 Cent, a true-life hoodlum-turned-hip-hop-star story.

Both Bullet Boy and Hustle & Flow deal with young black men trying to escape a life of minor criminality. Both eschew glamorising thug life in favour of thoughtful looks at the pressures that make rising above circumstances so difficult. Both have received respectful critical attention, and both were made by first-time directors, both white.

But while Bullet Boy was greeted with murmurs of approval, Hustle & Flow’s American release generated considerable controversy, most of it about the colour of the director, Craig Brewer. It was reminiscent of the debate generated by the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. On the one hand these films provided opportunities to African-American directors and actors that would otherwise never have been available. On the other hand they perpetuated the image of a flashy, promiscuous, violence-prone black man. More recently this stereotype has been repopularised by the hip-hop gangsta movies of the 1990s such as Juice and Menace II Society and indeed by aspects of hip-hop culture in general.

The British-born actor Delroy Lindo, who has appeared in studio action films such as the recent Domino and British independent films such as Wondrous Oblivion, feels that it is easier for a film about “the sensationalist aspects of what it means to be a black person on this planet” to get financing. Richard Yarborough, an associate professor of African-American studies at the University of California, is not so sure: “If audiences proved that they would go to see films about middle-class angst with a non-white cast, people would produce them.”

The good news is that young black male directors are now getting the chance to move out of making urban audience-oriented broad comedies or music videos into big-budget films such as The Italian Job or Fantastic Four. “But the small black art film is not going to get marketed as readily as a small white art film,” Yarborough says. “That’s just a matter of numbers.”

Meanwhile, serious contemporary dramas set in the African-American community, such as George Wolfe’s Lackawanna Blues (featuring both Howard and Lindo), are instead being produced by cable services such as HBO. By contrast, although it took Brewer three years to make, Hustle & Flow has had strong studio support since Paramount acquired it at Sundance. Thanks to aggressive marketing, the film got far more visibility than the average well-received Sundance drama set in a minority community.

In fact, Hustle & Flow resembles nothing so much as the Memphis version of The Harder They Come — another gritty story of a small-time hustler with a dream to make it in the music business — whose vivid evocation of its milieu, multilayered (male) characters and well-chosen soundtrack made the race of its (white) writer-director irrelevant. The real question is not what community a film is aimed at or the colour of its director, but whether it respects its audience.

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