From behind the headlines on inner-city crime, clashing civilizations, and the War on Terror comes filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's unexpected portrait of Puerto Rican Muslim Hamza Pérez, a former gang member and drug dealer turned politically outspoken hip-hop artist, anti-drug counselor, community activist, family man, and devout convert to Islam. By following the gentle but determined Hamza over the course of three years-during which he and a group of roughly sixty American Muslims moved from Massachusetts to found a religious community in Pittsburgh's crime-ridden North Side-New Muslim Cool offers an intimate vantage on a new generation of Latino and African American Muslims, youth in many cases drawn by the example of Malcolm X as well as the culture of hip-hop to weave a communal identity in the interstices between differing languages, ethnic backgrounds, religious ideals, and the racial and class tensions in American society post-9/11. Far from a static account, these three years hold many changes and an evolving understanding for single father Hamza, who enters a new marriage and an expanded interracial family, performs and records his music-pointed rhymes and exhortations laid over brooding beats under the band name Mujahideen Team-and finds both his Pittsburgh masjid (Muslim school) and his job as a religious speaker in the county jail subject to surveillance and challenges by suspicious federal authorities. Broaching urgent contemporary themes, New Muslim Cool is a story as inherently complex as it is strikingly American.