The success of She's Gotta Have It earned Spike Lee studio backing for his second feature, but he took the money and ran as far from the white mainstream as any Hollywood feature in recent memory. School Daze is a musical that out-rages Busby Berkeley, a comedy that crumbles Animal House crackers with a wild essay on class, color, and political consciousness at a fictional Southern black college. Here, sexuality, inequality and fraternity co-exist. A more fractious portrait of frat-house fascism has never been filmed, with Lee a slavering Halfpint among giants of the Gamma Phi Gamma variety. More heroic is Dap (Larry Fishburne), a lonely soldier in the divestment battle who hand delivers the film's message in a lovely coda. The women carry the central conflict-the clash between the "wannabees" and the "jigaboos"-to its logical extreme in a beauty-salon battle royal, but elsewhere, their presence as a goal for the uninitiated (Lee the anxious goalie) gives the film a sad glamor. Writer-director Lee is a comic (sur)realist hovering on the edge of the avant-garde (his homecoming game abstracts Horsefeathers' anarchy by dispensing with the game altogether, his beauty-shop number is as appropriately displaced as Chantal Akerman's Golden Eighties). In School Daze he makes as few concessions to conventional narrative as he does to political politesse.