RAPPIN' PIMP WITH A HEART OF GOLD

By KYLE SMITH

'HUSTLE & Flow" promises gritty street drama but delivers "Pretty Woman" with crunk instead of Roxette.

DJay (Terrence Howard) is a prince of a pimp who yearns for a career in crunk (Southern rap), and from that point there is no doubt about where the film is heading.

Howard was better in "Crash," but "Hustle" is strenuously engineered to get him an Oscar nomination. Every few scenes, the (predictable) action stops and the camera pulls into a dreamy closeup for a Moment that might as well have dotted lines around it with the instruction, "clip here." Many of these speeches, if cleaned up and corrected for grammar, would not be out of place on an episode of "Family Ties."

"We got our hands on the wheel, we in charge," he tells his blond ho Nola (Taryn Manning), demonstrating by placing her hands tenderly on the steering wheel. Still, Howard has the goods to be a star.

Other dialogue devised by writer-director Craig Brewer, a white man from Virginia, sounds as if it came from an outsider with his ear pressed to the wall: "Just because you got the bacon, the lettuce and the tomato, that doesn't mean I'm gonna give you my toast." I doubt that one's gonna catch on, Craig.

DJay lives with three of his hos in a ramshackle Memphis house he presides over like a ghetto Ward Cleaver. The film has boxed itself into a corner with DJay: If it showed him doing what pimps actually do (beating up hookers and keeping their earnings), we would never forgive him, no matter how plucky his rise.

But the only tough thing about him, really, is his potty mouth — the whole movie blushes with modesty, as in the strip club where the girls wear tops and bottoms — so his transformation isn't much of one.

Real pimps (see the documentary "American Pimp") don't hug and don't cry, as DJay does twice. They don't give lovey-dovey philosophical speeches, don't stop to give their girlfriends mad impetuous romantic kisses as they're leaving the house.

Instantly, DJay finds a genius producer and genius musician, and one of his hos turns out to be able to sing like Aretha. The team lays down a pair of sizzling tracks, but DJay's contribution is the least important element. He could rap the classified ads and it would still sound great. It's as if Rocky spent the big fight handling the spit bucket while Adrian and Mickey took turns in the ring.

The movie's moral? "You know what they say," says DJay, "everybody got to have a dream." Yes, they do say that, frequently, which is how it became a cliché.