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Returning guest Zach Vasquez (Crooked Marquee, The Guardian) comes back to discuss another LA Neo-noir, Bill Duke’s 1992 crime classic Deep Cover, on the eve of its arrival to the Criterion Collection.

One of the most radical studio releases of the nineties, Deep Cover stars Laurence Fishburne (in his final role billed as Larry) as an undercover cop posing as a drug dealer while working for the DEA. He teams up with an unsuspecting mobbed-up lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) and they form an unlikely friendship as Fishburne moves up the towards the top of a cocaine cartel and discovers the horrible truth about the war on drugs and the whims of U.S. foreign policy while wrestling with his own tortured conscience.

It’s a super-left political movie disguised as a thriller that got a wide release in 1992: a hip hop classic with echoes of film noir and even Apocalypse Now, made with great style by Bill Duke, loaded with quotable dialogue and charged with major Dudes Rock energy from Fishburne and Goldblum.

We also talk about how Deep Cover’s soundtrack draws a through-line between Serge Gainsbourg and Dr. Dre.

Follow Zach Vasquez on Twitter.

Trailer for Deep Cover (Duke, 1992)