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As a South Memphis pimp named DJay, Terrence Howard, the star of “Hustle & Flow” (opening on July 22nd), speaks in a soft, smoky voice that trails off into nothingness. DJay is very shrewd, but his life is at a dead end, and he knows it. He runs three girls out of an old multicolored Chevrolet; the tricks who roll up next to him have air-conditioning in their cars, and DJay doesn’t. He sells drugs on the side, but he’s halfhearted about it—the drugs are most useful not for making money but as a way of bribing a neighbor into doing a favor. It is the conceit of “Hustle & Flow” that this petty criminal is a man of decency and promise, and Howard, a major actor (he was the harassed TV director in “Crash”), anchors the conceit in flesh and blood. His chattering hustler has the obscure, ruminative wit of a street-corner philosopher who implies more than he says; Howard turns his come-ons and rants into a sullen art. The movie asks whether that particular art is convertible yet again—whether DJay’s hustle can be transformed into the thumping flow of the Memphis-style rap known as crunk. As Howard develops DJay’s frustration and rue, he avoids the obvious, the overemphatic. His self-mocking performance is so ironically refined and allusive that one might think that Duke Ellington himself had slipped into an old undershirt and hit the fetid streets of Memphis.

The movie is at its best when the writer-director, Craig Brewer, a white man from Memphis, simply noses around the scraggly neighborhoods and down-at-the-heels clubs of his old home town. This is a hot-weather picture: everything unfolds in the kind of Southern steam that wilts any effort aimed at more than mere survival. Such cinematic time-passing is fine with me. I could easily spend two hours just watching Howard hassling the working girls (Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson, and Paula Jai Parker, all terrific) or listening to Howard and Isaac Hayes, who plays a club owner, greet each other—their conversational manner is that rich. But, with an awkward lurch, and an eye on DJay’s possible redemption, the movie shifts into a conventionally upbeat show-business story: DJay assembles a group of irregulars, including a henpecked sound engineer (Anthony Anderson); a skinny white guy (D. J. Qualls) who makes his living servicing concession machines but knows how to lay down crunk’s bass-heavy tracks; and one of DJay’s women, Shug (Henson), who learns to sing an introductory hook. Using DJay’s bottom-dog laments (“It’s hard out here for a pimp when you’re trying to get the money for the rent,” etc.), this gang works up a song, “Whoop Dat Trick,” which they hope will be a hit. As a myth of creation, the putting together of the song, element by element, over a period of days, is enormously enjoyable, even if it isn’t especially convincing.

“Hustle & Flow” may resemble other show-business fables in its over-all shape, but it has an acrid flavor all its own. DJay places his bets for success on presenting “Whoop Dat Trick” and other songs to a Memphis-born rapper named Skinny Black—Chris (Ludacris) Bridges—who has made a fortune in the music business and is back in town for a few days. Howard and Ludacris memorably met once before, in the front seat of an S.U.V. in “Crash.” This meeting, which goes through assorted moods of screw-you indifference, drunken bonhomie, and crazy violence in about ten minutes of hair-raising screen time, tops the earlier one. “Hustle & Flow” ends with a burst of movie-ish mayhem, and then a burst of sentiment, but when Brewer, Howard, and Ludacris stick to the bitter texture of South Memphis failure and success they produce a modest regional portrait that could become a classic of its kind.