[The] Brother is in town with a flick called "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," and let me tell you: Van Peebles is absolutely outside. I mean, the cat is wonderfully crazy, you know. And Bearing Witness to his film is like staring at a Black key sliding through the cosmos, turning sturdy locks and letting out weird human figurines to scatter among us. Spilling psycho conversations in our ears. Through the lens of the Van Peebles camera comes a very basic Black America, unadorned by faith, and seething with an eternal violence.

It is a terrifying vision, the Blood's nightmare journey through Watts, and it is a vision Black people alone will really understand in all of its profane and abrasive substance.

The film is an outrage. Designed to blow minds. A disgraceful and blasphemous parade of brilliantly precise stereotypical Blacks and Whites, all drawn extravagantly and with impossible...