Very nominally “based on the play by Langston Hughes’’ (as the credits claim), Kasi Lemmons’ “Black Nativity’’ is a family-friendly, Hallmark Channel-ready musical dramatic fable whose plot more closely resembles Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer.’’
Pop singer Jacob Latimore acquits himself well as 15-year-old Langston, sent to spend Christmas with his grandparents in modern-day Harlem after his financially struggling single mom (Jennifer Hudson) loses their home in Baltimore.
Named after the famous Harlem poet-playwright, Langston is unhappy about being uprooted. And he nurses a grudge against his minister grandpa (Forest Whitaker) and grandma (Angela Bassett), whom he’s never met before, because the elders have not spoken to Mom since she left Harlem with Langston’s long-absent dad.
Langston wants to get back to Baltimore stat, and he’s tempted to resort to crime to help out his mom.
All of the family’s issues get patly worked out amid awkwardly staged excerpts from Hughes’ original 1960 work at Grandpa’s church, including a musical cameo by Mary J. Blige.
The adaptation by director Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) has lots of singing in a musical mishmash of spirituals, rap and spoken word with occasionally wince-inducing lyrics (“my holidays/ are hollow days’’).
And it veers from slightly gritty reality (represented by Tyrese Gibson and Lemmons’ husband, Vondie Curtis-Hall, as pawnshop employees) to pure fantasy.
It’s set in a New York City where long-distance buses discharge passengers in the middle of Times Square, yellow cabs don’t hesitate to take fares from Midtown to Harlem — and where juvenile Langston, falsely accused of pickpocketing, ends up sharing a cell with adult suspects.
“Black Nativity’’ does give Oscar winner Hudson (“Dreamgirls’’) a fine opportunity to shine as a singer.
Whitaker and Bassett lend class to the proceedings — though it does seem odd to see Whitaker playing the son of an associate of Martin Luther King Jr. the same year he portrayed the father of one in “The Butler.’’