CINEMA: By The Dots

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IT IS DIFFICULT TO BE A YOUNG BLACK filmmaker like John Singleton. His race tends to impose racism on him as a subject. His youth and his status as a generational spokesman oblige him to assume a particular attitude, an outraged political correctness that extends to other, nonracial matters (notably sexism). His audience, which is also young, meanwhile makes, or seems to make, contradictory demands on him -- for violently dramatic confrontations on one hand; for hopeful, or at least not entirely bleak, conclusions on the other.

Higher Learning is the desperately confused response to all these pressures. It finds on a single college campus every imaginable youthful type: a track star on an athletic scholarship (Omar Epps), who is convinced he is being exploited; his very smart, very pretty girlfriend (Tyra Banks), who is coolly intent on using the system to her advantage; a young white woman (Kristy Swanson), victimized by date rape, tempted by lesbianism, ultimately redeemed and betrayed by her idealistic political activism; a socially maladroit loner (Michael Rapaport), who finds a dank spiritual home with the local neo- Nazis. The rapper Ice Cube is on hand as a perpetual graduate student and guru to the black activists. Laurence Fishburne represents adult authority as an arrogant, challenging and ultimately wise and sympathetic political-science professor.

These aren't really characters; they are points on a rigidly conceived political spectrum. From the moment you meet him, you know, for example, that Rapaport's miserable character has only one fate and one function: to bring the movie to a predictably bloody, conventionally instructive but emotionally abstract conclusion. Singleton has made all the right political moves given his complicated circumstances, but he hasn't really made a movie of them.

R.S.