Do the Right Thing: Spike Lee’s Controversial 1989 Film Guide

There is something almost unbearably tense about watching a single day unravel. Spike Lee’s 1989 comedy-drama takes place on the hottest day of the year in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and by the time the credits roll, a neighborhood has burned down, a Black man is dead, and audiences are still arguing about who threw the first punch. That argument, it turns out, is the whole point.

Director: Spike Lee · Release Year: 1989 · Runtime: 120 minutes · Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91% · Setting: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

The table below consolidates core production and release details for quick reference.

Why is Do the Right Thing controversial?

Lee’s third feature film became a flashpoint before it even opened widely. Critics including David Denby of New York magazine wrote that the ending was “a shambles, and if some audiences go wild, [Lee is] partly responsible” — implying Black viewers could not restrain themselves. Lee fired back hard, calling out white reviewers for suggesting that Black audiences lacked self-control. The controversy was not merely about the film’s content; it was about who had the right to interpret it.

Racial tensions depicted

The plot centers on simmering friction between African-American residents of a Brooklyn block and Salvatore Frangione (Sal), an Italian-American pizzeria owner whose Wall of Fame displays exclusively white celebrities. When Buggin’ Out demands representation, Sal tears up the pizza of the only Black customer — and tensions spiral from there. The film captures how small humiliations accumulate into something combustible. Lee argued that audiences fixating on the riot miss the real violence: the police killing of Radio Raheem that triggers it.

Critical reactions at release

Film critics were divided along predictable lines. White critics tended to focus on the film’s formal inventiveness while expressing anxiety about its “dangerous” emotional directness. Black critics largely praised its unflinching portrayal of everyday racism. The pattern holds across reviews: formal accomplishment was credited; moral urgency was treated as a liability.

Predictions of violence

Joe Klein, another New York magazine critic, wrote that Spike Lee himself “starts the riot by throwing a garbage can through the store’s window.” This framing placed responsibility for real-world copycat unrest directly on Lee’s shoulders. The implication: Black filmmakers had an obligation to pacify their audiences rather than provoke them. Lee found this logic condescending and said so plainly.

Is Do the Right Thing a good film?

By virtually every measure of critical standing, yes. The film earned a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising its formal energy, sharp ensemble acting, and willingness to sit in discomfort. It earned two Academy Award nominations and was included on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films. That ranking places it in rare company alongside films like Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver.

Critical acclaim

Roger Ebert called it “one of the finest American films of the decade.” The ensemble cast — Danny Aiello as Sal, Ossie Davis as Da Mayor, Ruby Dee as Mother Sister, Giancarlo Esposito as Buggin’ Out, Bill Nunn as Radio Raheem — delivered performances that have become iconic. Martin Lawrence and Rosie Perez made their feature film debuts here, a fact that seems almost impossible given how fully formed their presences are on screen.

Audience reception

Box office performance was solid for an independent production, though exact figures remain disputed in available sources. The film found its audience through word of mouth and became a cultural touchstone that continues to generate discussion more than three decades later. That longevity is its own kind of verdict.

Awards and legacy

The awards story is complicated. The film received two Oscar nominations but notably was not nominated for Best Picture. At the 62nd Academy Awards on March 26, 1990, Driving Miss Daisy won that prize instead. Lee reportedly threatened director Wim Wenders over the Cannes snub, saying he had “better watch out” and that he had “a Louisville slugger bat with Wenders’s name on it.” Whether or not the threat was serious, it captured the anger felt by many over what seemed like deliberate marginalization.

The pattern reveals how Oscar politics in 1990 sidelined urgent Black filmmaking in favor of comfortable narratives.

What’s the point of the movie Do the Right Thing?

Lee’s film resists easy moralizing. The title itself is a provocation — the film never tells us what the right thing is, only that the question is worth asking and that easy answers are insufficient. The hottest day of the year becomes a pressure cooker for grievances that have been accumulating for years, then decades. The point is that there is no clean resolution, only aftermath.

Themes of racism and heat

The heat is both literal and symbolic. A thermometer officially reads 99 degrees by late afternoon, and the neighborhood bakes along with every character’s patience. Lee uses this setting to literalize what metaphor usually does in less confident hands. Every character is at their limit before anything violent happens, and the film earns its climax by showing us what that limit looks like on a block where people know each other’s names.

Community dynamics

The neighborhood is a cross-section of Black Brooklyn life: Mookie delivering pizza and avoiding commitment, his sister Jade tired of the block, Radio Raheem amplifying everything through a boombox playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Da Mayor, played by Ossie Davis, is the only character who pleads for calm as the violence builds. His voice is not triumphant — no one listens to him — but Lee gives him the moral weight the film refuses to give anyone else.

Climax and message

When police kill Radio Raheem during a confrontation at Sal’s pizzeria, the neighborhood erupts. Mookie’s act of throwing a trash can through the window redirects the violence toward property rather than people — specifically away from Sal, whom Mookie has known since childhood. Some viewers interpret this as heroic; Lee himself noted he has “never been asked that question by a person of color” — meaning whether Mookie did the right thing. The film refuses to answer, which is the answer.

Was Do the Right Thing based on a true story?

The film is not a direct adaptation of any single event, but it draws heavily from real racial violence that shaped Lee’s youth. The Howard Beach incident of 1989 — in which a white mob killed a Black man, Michael Griffith, in Queens — was a direct inspiration. The film is set in Brooklyn, the characters are fictional, but the grievances are documented.

Inspirations from real events

Lee has cited multiple real incidents that fed into the film’s DNA. The Howard Beach killing happened while Lee was writing the script. Police brutality against Black men — then underreported and today front-page news — runs through the film’s climax. The specific dynamic of Italian-American and Black neighborhoods in New York also reflects documented patterns of ethnic tension in the city.

Fictional narrative

The characters and their specific names are Lee’s inventions. Mookie, Sal, Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheem — none are based on particular real people. The Wall of Fame argument is original to the film, as is the character of Smiley, who pins together photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X on the pizzeria’s ruined wall. These fictional elements are what give the film its particular emotional charge.

Spike Lee’s experiences

Lee grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, not far from Bedford-Stuyvesant, and his background as an NYU film student who came up through the Black film movement of the 1980s shaped his sensibility. The film reflects his generation’s frustrations: integrated in theory, separate in practice; legal equality without social equality. The fictional frame lets him be specific in ways that documentary might not.

Who is in the Do the Right Thing cast?

The ensemble is one of the film’s greatest assets. Lee drew from his network of theater actors and friends, and the casting has a lived-in quality that big studio productions rarely achieve. Many of these actors went on to major careers — some from this film, some despite it.

Spike Lee as Mookie

Lee plays Mookie, a 25-year-old delivery man who lives in the neighborhood with his sister Jade and his son Hector. Mookie is not heroic in any conventional sense — he is absent-minded about his girlfriend Tina, unreliable about his son, and his act of violence at the climax is ambiguous rather than triumphant. Lee plays him with a detachment that reads differently now than it did in 1989.

Giancarlo Esposito role

Giancarlo Esposito plays Buggin’ Out, the tenant who initiates the Wall of Fame confrontation after noticing that Sal’s wall of celebrity photos includes no Black faces. Buggin’ Out is the catalyst for the film’s central argument, and Esposito plays him with a righteous fury that is funny and frightening at the same time. The character’s insistence that representation matters — “Yo, Sal, why is there no pictures of brothas on your wall?” — reads as prophetic in retrospect.

Key ensemble actors

Danny Aiello earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Sal, the pizzeria owner who is not a cartoon bigot but something more ambiguous: a man who employs Black workers, respects some of his neighbors, and yet maintains a Wall of Fame that erases them entirely. Aiello himself suggested he did not view Sal as racist — a reading some critics have contested. Bill Nunn’s Radio Raheem becomes the film’s tragic center. Ossie Davis brings gravity to Da Mayor, the building super who has the last word even if no one listens.

Wim Wenders has better watch out cause I’m waiting for his ass. Somewhere deep in my closet I have a Louisville slugger bat with Wenders’s name on it. — Spike Lee, Director (The Film Experience)

The end of this movie is a shambles, and if some audiences go wild, [Lee is] partly responsible. — David Denby, Critic, New York magazine (Britannica)

More than three decades after its release, Do the Right Thing keeps asking questions that Hollywood would prefer to sidestep. It was snubbed for Best Picture at an Academy Awards ceremony that chose a film about a polite friendship between a white woman and a Black man over one about street-level racial warfare. That choice has aged poorly, and the film’s 91% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests audiences eventually agreed. The debate over whether Mookie did the right thing is not academic. Lee designed it that way.

The implication is that the film’s staying power lies in its refusal to provide easy answers where none exist.

Related reading: Cast of Mamma Mia! (Film)

The film’s electric ensemble includes John Turturro as the volatile Pino, whose complete filmography spans decades of memorable Spike Lee collaborations.

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