Tupac Shakur’s breakthrough performance in 1992’s Juice, which has just been released on a 25th anniversary Blu-Ray edition, begins on a surprisingly understated note. In his home at least, Tupac’s Bishop dutifully plays the role of the good, doting grandson and son. Even when he’s approached by rival kids, he’s tough but a little tentative until he sees his buddies approaching.

At this point, Bishop morphs instantly into the 2Pac of the popular imagination, a brash, aggressive, irreverent wild card for whom smack-talking came as easily as breathing. Bishop turns tough and defiant because he knows his crew will back him up in a fight but also because he now has an audience to play to. A preening sociopath like Bishop needs an audience.

Bishop’s violent swagger is authentic; he backs up his words with bullets and an ever-growing body count. But his posturing is also an elaborate performance rooted as much in the gangster movies and gangsta rap he and his friends mainline as his own very real and very obvious demons. That makes him not unlike Shakur himself, a sensitive, poetry-loving theater kid who grew up in New York and Baltimore but reinvented himself as 2Pac, the ultimate bad-ass West Coast gangsta rapper. Before Bishop was the star-making role of a lifetime, 2Pac was; Shakur spent his brief career alternating between playing the hero, the sexy, swaggering anti-hero, and a larger-than-life villain, and never got the credit he deserved for the quality of that performance.

Juice casts an impossibly beautiful Shakur as its heavy, one of a quartet of New York street kids who while away the hours chasing girls, partying and executing petty scams that escalate into felonies thanks to Bishop’s icy ambition. Driven by the propulsive, gritty score of Public Enemy producers The Bomb Squad and directed and co-written by former Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, Juice brought the tough-guy fatalism of 1930s and 40s Warner Brothers melodramas to the early 1990s hood movie. The young, hungry Shakur had the presence of a young James Cagney or Edgar G. Robinson, albeit a whole lot more handsome. Dickerson shoots Tupac like he’s less a human being than a malevolent spirit with the power to magically appear wherever he poses the most immediate threat.

Tupac’s recording career was famously characterized as much by quantity as quality. So it’s not surprising that his film career after Juice had its share of duds as well. His Marlon Brando-level presence that was largely wasted on grubby little crime movies like Above the Rim, Gang Related (which was released posthumously), the fascinatingly insane Mickey Rourke-co-written psychodrama Bullet as well as John Singleton’s 1993’s ambitious but leaden romance Poetic Justice.


But then, finally, there’s 1997’s posthumously released Gridlock’d. As a heroin addict struggling to get clean, Shakur is a revelation, funny and sad and effortlessly authentic. In Juice, he exuded power (the film’s title is street slang for power) but here he delivers a performance devoid of vanity, narcissism, and ego. He’s a consummate team player, a real actor willing, even eager, to subsume his ego to help writer-director Vondie Curtis Hall realize his vision.

What makes Gridlock’d so heartbreaking are the autobiographical undertones. When Spoon asks Stretch, “Ever feel like your luck’s running out? Lately, I’ve been feeling like my luck’s been running out” Tupac seems to be speaking through his character.

2Pac the rapper and Tupac Shakur the man were constantly evolving. That growth ended with Shakur’s death. Shakur kept pumping out “new” albums after his death, but Gridlock’d and Gang Related were the end of the line for him cinematically—as an actor, at least. He’s been the subject of more documentaries than some world wars, and has been played on stage and on film by Anthony Mackie. In this month’s biopic A_ll Eyez on Me_ he’s played by newcomer Demetrius Shipp Jr., who won’t just have to capture the energy of one of the most charismatic and important artists of the past century but one hell of an actor, as well.