She's Gotta Have It (1986)
Sometimes the backstory sells a film harder than the film can sell itself. She's Gotta Have It arrives wrapped in one of indie cinema's great origin stories: Spike Lee, fresh out of film school, scrapes together $175,000, shoots something raw and alive and entirely his own, and watches it earn back more than seven million dollars at the box office. That kind of legend creates a very particular kind of pressure on the viewer, and I'll be straight with you. Walking in with all of that rattling around in my head, I came out the other side feeling a little flat.
That's not a dismissal. This is not a bad film. But "not bad" and "groundbreaking masterpiece" are two very different places to land, and the hype had set me up expecting the latter.
What Lee has made here is something genuinely scrappy and spirited, shot mostly in black and white with the rough, talk-heavy energy you'd associate with early Kevin Smith. Clerks popped into my head almost immediately, which tells you something about the texture of the thing. Long dialogue scenes, characters articulating their inner lives directly at the camera, the sense that the budget is being stretched by sheer force of personality rather than technical resources. There's an honesty to that approach that I respect. The film follows Nola Darling, a fiercely independent young Brooklyn woman navigating three very different men in her life simultaneously, and it frames her choices as her own, which was genuinely bold for 1986 and remains interesting now.
The problem, for me, is Tracy Camilla Johns in the lead. She's a striking presence on screen, and I don't want to be unfair to her, but the delivery never quite landed. There were moments where lines felt recited rather than lived in, and when your entire film rests on the audience buying completely into one character's interiority and desire, that's a significant obstacle. I kept being pulled slightly out of it every time I needed to be most invested. It's a shame, because the whole premise depends on Nola being magnetic enough that you understand immediately why three men are circling her. Intellectually I accepted it. Emotionally I didn't fully feel it.
The pacing, too, wobbles. Some of those dialogue exchanges crackle with wit and momentum. Others outstay their welcome, and the film loses a bit of grip in the middle stretches. It's the kind of unevenness that's almost forgivable in a debut made on that kind of shoestring, but forgivable isn't the same as invisible.
What I can't do, though, is pretend the cultural weight of this film doesn't matter. She's Gotta Have It cracked a door open for Black independent filmmakers in America in a way that genuinely changed the landscape. It put a Black woman's sexuality and autonomy at the centre of the story without apology, which was a radical act in the commercial cinema of its era. Thinking about films like Sugar Cane Alley, which gave Black experience that same kind of serious, unpatronising attention just a few years before, you can see a broader movement in world cinema toward exactly these kinds of stories. Lee's contribution to that is real and lasting.
So where does that leave me? Three stars out of five feels right. It's a vital, scrappy piece of movie history that earns its place on any serious watch-list, especially if you want to understand where one of American cinema's most distinct voices came from. Watch it for the context, watch it for the ambition, watch it to see what a determined filmmaker can do with practically nothing. Just go in with your expectations calibrated to "impressive debut" rather than "all-time classic", and you'll get a lot more out of it than I did going in cold on the legend alone.
Good, not great. Worth every minute of your time, but not quite the revelation its story suggests it ought to be.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1986 | Watched: 2026-06-25
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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