Less a portrait than a meditation on Langston Hughes, this new film by British director Isaac Julien (The Passion of Remembrance, see February 26) "looks for Langston" in the worlds evoked by Hughes' poetry. Like the poems, Julien's images are infused with the Blues. But their text is what Julien finds to be the subtext of the poems, and Hughes' life, what might be called a Ballad of Black Gay Desire. Julien conjures up the Harlem renaissance of the twenties-of which Hughes was perhaps the key figure-in moodily re-shot archival footage. But again this is Harlem as seen from the gay angle with elegant black men dancing cheek-to-cheek in a hidden speakeasy, and the inevitable police raid. Enacted sequences bring the subject of black homosexuality into the present. Dedicated to James Baldwin, the film speaks to the double disenfranchisement of the gay black and searches for an original iconography that, like Genet's, explodes through the repression. In placing Hughes in the context of homosexual culture the filmmaker put himself in the middle of the controversy, and the film in a copyright dispute with the Hughes estate that resulted in its being shown at the 1989 New York Film Festival with its soundtrack partially excised.