While maintaining the essential stagey character of Roger Guenveur Smith's one-man show about the late black revolutionary, A Huey P. Newton Story offers plenty of stylistic flourishes to "open up" the play, beginning with several roving cameras and what must be an average shot time of around five seconds. That fragmentation isn't all that distracting, as it more or less matches Newton's own jumpiness; he admits he is not a man who is comfortable being a leader or a hero ("which is a sandwich," he says wryly), and that he is not comfortable divulging details of his personal life (which he does anyway, allowing that he was named after Huey P. Long and that his childhood nickname was Baby Huey). Director Spike Lee also includes illustrative film clips and stills, usually as background to close-ups of Smith; presumably these were inserted in the editing process, so the theater audience did not see them. He also runs Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" on the soundtrack while Smith dances and gyrates nervously, almost as an entr'acte device (at several other points, Smith simply pushes away the microphone and falls silent, as if to recharge his batteries). There's a certainly a lot of energy expended here (and a lot of Kool cigarettes smoked), but the result isn't nearly as informative nor as moving as it could have been, given the talents of the collaborators (who had made five films together). Smith quotes Newton saying, "Any time a black man in America stands up against the slave mentality, he's going to scare a lot of white people-and some black people, too." But the play's dependence on Newton's fractured ramblings and quick film clips to dramatize that proposition isn't very convincing.