The 1989 shoestring production Chameleon Street was directed and written by Wendell B. Harris, who also plays the lead role of Doug Stone, a con man and sort of serial impersonator. In the movie, Harris's Street pretends to be a Harvard Medical School graduate and talks his way into a residency at Wayne State Medical School; he enrolls at Yale as a French exchange student, despite the apparent handicap of not speaking French. ("J'accuse, Jacques Cousteau.") Fixated on a woman who's a basketball player for Midwestern University — Paula McGee, who appears in the movie as herself — he presents himself as a Time magazine journalist and snags an interview with her. Other movies about successful impersonators share the joke that a big part of life is just appearing to be what you say you are, but Street's story has a special wrinkle that gives it extra potency: Street is black, and he knows from angry first-hand experience how important something as irrelevant as skin color is when it comes to deciding who gets ahead, or who just gets his foot in the door. When we first meet him, the smart, capable Street is already so embittered and ironic that proving himself by beating the white man on his own terms would give him no satisfaction at all. He wants what he wants now — and he also wants to show that the rules by which more cowed, conventional mortals agree to be judged are a joke. So he talks his way into scary situations and then somehow delivers: as a medical resident, he manages to brazen his way through his first surgery. But he's also sloppy and careless about the little things in a way that indicates a self-destructive streak: his Time-interviewer pose crumbles when someone takes a look at his letter of introduction and notices that he's misspelled the word "writer."

Chameleon Street isn't perfect; it's flawed in ways that betray its budget and Harris's inexperience. Sets often look as if they'd been thrown together in about five minutes using whatever motel lobby decorations were at hand, and Harris, staging one remarkable scene from Street's life after another, doesn't make it clear how much time is passing or to what degree Street has cut himself off from his family or how hot the police are on his trail. (Street's desire to keep climbing to better things extends to his romantic life — after things don't work out with Paula McGee, he romances a Yale student while costumed in homage to Jean Marais in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. At the same time, though, he can't shake his addiction to his wife, and this unbreakable tie to his "real" life will lead to his downfall.) But many of us find it easy to shrug off the film's problems in light of what it has going for it. It's got its own distinctive humor, yet it's also eerie, and sometimes downright creepy, in a way that's appropriate for the story of a man who's only fully alive when he's in way over his head. Much of its power comes from Harris's performance. His condescension and contempt for everything around him--his feeling of being better than those around him when he's down and his need to put one over on his supposed betters--is chillingly believable, but with an undercurrent of real pain that makes him a hard man to simply dislike. When Doug pretends to be a doctor or lawyer, he doesn't quietly blend in, which you might assume would be the safest route; he puffs himself up like a ham actor, but in a way that those around him are quick to take for a show of authority. He's a very convincing phony.

Chameleon Street won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival and then went into limited theatrical release in the spring of 1991. That should have been felicitous timing. Black experience as it was captured in movies by up-and-coming filmmakers, such as Boyz N the Hood, Daughters of the Dust, Hangin' with the Homeboys, and others, was the hot entertainment media story of 1991, but Chameleon Street couldn't get a piece of it. The movie couldn't get any traction in terms of national attention. In December 1991, with the picture long gone from theaters, there was a report on the short-lived PBS arts magazine series Edge that indicated that the same executives who'd been eager to cut deals with Spike Lee and John Singleton had seen Harris's film and it had just made them uncomfortable. (One point of contention was apparently a scene where Doug Street pleasantly points out to someone that white people smell like dogs.) Harris reportedly received, and turned down, one offer from a studio that wanted to buy the picture, but not to release it; they wanted to remake it with Will Smith in the lead. (This was before Smith had first appeared in a movie, and some years before he's have the lead role in one; in 1991, he was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.)

To say that Harris never managed to follow up on Chameleon Street (which was some four years in the making) is an understatement: not only has he not made another movie, his sly starring performance didn't even lead to much in the way of acting work. (Seven years after completing Chameleon Street, he played an officious FBI boss in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, and subsequently turned up in the 2000 gross-out comedy Road Trip. One website asserts that he's been at work on a documentary on UFOs.) This week, Chameleon Street debuts on DVD, with such bonus features as a making-of documentary and commentary and laudatory essay by the critic Armond White. It would be nice if whatever attention it now generates serves to flush Harris out into the open, but in the meantime it's just nice that the movie is locatable again. And if you rent it along with Out of Sight and Road Trip, you'll have the makings of one of the world's shortest and cheapest comprehensive career film retrospectives.