Still, most will agree that Terrence Howard's acting as the hustler hero is remarkable.
Howard can usually be counted on to be the most magnetic presence in most of the nothing roles he's usually offered. He brought an electrically sinister note to a friendly card game in a romantic comedy called ''The Best Man," and he was very sharp in an implausible part as a ticked-off executive in ''Crash," the overwrought drama that came out this spring.
''Hustle & Flow" is the biggest vehicle yet, though hardly the best, for his talents. He plays DJay, a man whose lines of work provide food for his makeshift family, but they feed his soul. The character wears his hair slicked back in a press-and-curl. He never leaves the house without a long white tank top hugging his rangy trunk. He curses up a storm and wraps his twang around a word like ''man" until it is two or three times its usual length.
One afternoon, DJay runs into Key (Anthony Anderson), an old acquaintance and a devout Christian who works as a sound engineer. DJay drops in on him, recording in a church, where a woman powerfully sings opera-laced gospel about Jesus and salvation. DJay sits in a pew and is moved to tears. He wants to be saved.
But his day-to-day problems are more mundane. He shares a house with a feisty woman named Lexus (Paula Jai Parker, who's terrific), a dim, white one named Nola (Taryn Manning), and a pregnant, mousy one named Shug (Taraji P. Henson).
They turn tricks for DJay, leaving him with a nagging problem: Every night, he has to come home to his work. The movie tries to dramatize this domestic headache, but writer-director Craig Brewer's idea of living-room drama consists of ear-splitting, expletive-heavy screaming matches between man and woman that no one seems to win.
In this sense, he's learned a great deal from the movie's co-producer and chief champion, John Singleton, whose own South Central Los Angeles melodramas have perfected the male-to-female shout-down.
