Afro on the Outside, Punk on the Inside

Ever since he began screening his documentary "Afro-Punk" in 2003, former Brooklyn resident James Spooner has become a conduit for a generation that often feels stuck in a cultural divide. The 32-year-old filmmaker shot the music documentary out of a need both to connect with and expose a nation of folks like himself — fans of indie-rock and punk-inspired do-it-yourself culture who are often the only minorities in a minority culture.

"Afro-Punk," which features concert footage of seminal punk bands, such as the all-black quartet Bad Brains, and interviews with such black rock musicians as Kyp Malone (guitarist for the Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio), became a powerful magnet.

"There's no shortage of young black kids out there who come up and tell me their story," Mr. Spooner, who traveled with the film to more than 300 screenings and also created a Web site and online community (afropunk.com), said recently. Now living in Los Angeles, the director returns to Brooklyn this weekend to launch the fourth annual Afro-Punk Festival. Beginning Friday, the six-day film and music event will spill out of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinematek and into the streets with free nightly concerts in the "Afro-Punk Skate Park" adjacent to BAM, as well as a daylong block party — headlined by Detroit garage-rock howlers the Dirtbombs — in Fort Greene Park on July 12.

The film series, which is co-curated by BAMcinematek's Jake Perlin, takes a more creative angle on mixing and matching works of often sharply contrasting styles and genres. Last year, for instance, along with documentaries, independent efforts, and cinematic flashbacks to the 1960s, there was J. Lee Thompson's 1972 film "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes."

"It wasn't just any old 'Planet of the Apes,'" Mr. Spooner said. "It was the ape revolution one! That was a clear metaphor for race relations." When he proposed that BAM include the film, the programmers' "eyes lit up like little sci-fi geeks, and they actually were able to get a brand-new print of the film."

This year's lineup includes revivals of Hal Ashby ("The Landlord"), Bill Gunn ("Ganja and Hess"), and Jules Dassin ("Up Tight!"), as well as a slew of music documentaries old and new. These include 1971's "Soul to Soul," which captures Tina Turner and Wilson Pickett in Africa as they celebrate Ghanian independence, and the new "The Upsetter: The Music and Genius of Lee Scratch Perry," a free-association survey of the legendary Jamaican producer's eccentric life and times that, while sloppily assembled, resurrects priceless home-video footage shot by Mr. Perry amid his many marijuana-inspired reveries.

But the festival's breaking news comes courtesy of its premieres of new efforts, such as Mr. Spooner's feature "White Lies, Black Sheep" and Jennifer Sharp's "I'm Through With White Girls." Both films, as per the impetus of the festival itself, center around characters who don't fit convenient notions of how someone is supposed to be "black."

In "White Lies," a 20-something club promoter named A.J. (Ayinde Howell) comes to terms with his heritage while feeling increasingly alienated within a mostly white circle of friends on the Williamsburg nightlife circuit. His processed hair and tight-fitting jeans earn him jeers when he visits his father in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and his white buddies chastise him for only pursuing the affections of white women.

"The problem of race is one that comes from both sides," Mr. Spooner said. "A.J. has a problem with his white friends who don't think that he's really black, and then he's got a problem with his family and his neighborhood because they don't think he's black enough." A.J., Mr. Spooner said, is not a surrogate for his creator, who frames the film as a low-budget documentary shoot. But the film draws extensively from his own experiences.

"I'm Through With White Girls," an unreleased comedy set in Los Angeles, makes an engaging companion piece to Mr. Spooner's film. It details the plight of Jay Brooks (Anthony Montgomery), a black comic-book geek turned graphic novelist who struggles to break his pattern of having only white girlfriends. Jay is the anti-Morris Chestnut, the upwardly mobile male lead of myriad black relationship comedies: He has no car, shares a shabbily decorated apartment, and can't dance. He's an enigma to women of color. "He's hanging out at the Silver Lake bars, and they just don't get him," Mr. Spooner said, likening Jay to the character created by the actor-musician Stew in the Tony-winning Broadway musical "Passing Strange." Then he meets Catherine (Lia Johnson), a biracial novelist with blue dreadlocks who may turn out to be an unlikely soul mate. She's terrified of reading her work aloud because she talks like a Valley girl.

One of the more interesting elements of "White Girls" is how it critiques black popular culture's representation of its own: The film riffs on the aggravated folksiness of Tyler Perry's multi-generational family hooplas, as well as the cool, urban dynamic of Spike Lee's occasional sex comedies. "It sounds ludicrous to say this, but black people are not only one kind of thing," Mr. Spooner said. "But slowly and surely, people are starting to get it."

The Afro-Punk Festival runs between July 4 and July 9 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).