Seldom has music elevated a B-movie the way Curtis Mayfield's score boosts Superfly. While the film's acting, editing, and camerawork occasionally feel stilted, Mayfield's near-perfect score proceeds with a grace that simultaneously reflects the grit and grime of street life and soars above it. Part of the first wave of blaxploitation movies fueled by the success of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Gordon Parks Jr.'s Superfly stars the recently departed Ron O'Neal as a flamboyantly attired cocaine dealer who wearies of the danger and stress of the dope game and decides to make a million dollars so he can go straight. His less-ambitious partner can't envision an existence that doesn't involve pushing drugs, but he wearily goes along with O'Neal's plan, at least until corrupt white cops enter the scene with an agenda of their own. A veteran stage actor, O'Neal invests his soulful dope dealer with a regal bearing and a seriousness befitting Shakespeare: Superfly is in many ways classic pulp, but O'Neal and Mayfield push it toward a sort of epic grandeur. Like a lot of blaxploitation movies, Superfly has overt but muddled politics–the film is permeated with disgust toward capitalism, which it presents as cruel, corrupt, and racist. But its solution is more capitalism: For Superfly to get out of a dirty, fixed game, he needs to play it harder than ever before. In a hypnotic interview about his signature role, O'Neal says that his charismatic dope dealer is "more American than the American Dream," an observation more observant in many respects than Superfly itself. Similarly, Mayfield's lyrics articulate the hopes, dreams, anguish, pain, and contradictions of the title character more eloquently and seductively than Phillip Fenty's somewhat misshapen script. Superfly's big score ultimately belongs not to its dope-dealing protagonist, but to Mayfield, whose work gives the film its enormous cultural resonance.