Tonight the film “HipHop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” for which the banner ad is blinking up there at the top of the site, is airing on PBS. I guess it pretty much makes me a shill if I say it’s worth seeing. But it is. It’s well worth seeing!

Filmmaker and hip-hop lover Byron Hurt, after years of making excuses for hip-hop in his role as an anti-violence counselor, finally took his questions on the road—to the artists, the editors, the programmers, the fans: What happened to hip-hop? How is it, exactly, that as the number of hip-hop artists expanded and the product moved like mad contagion around the globe, that the message narrowed and the style became a puppet show of over-the-top posturing and bling-and-booty foolishness?

Hurt begins the film in Miami at Spring Bling Weekend, BET’s annual version of MTV’s spring break. The streets are all mock-gangsta puffery, with teenage wannabe rappers spitting homemade rhymes at the camera about gunplay and killin niggas and bangin hoes, while others grab at women passersby, calling them bitches and lifting their skirts. “Yo, I felt like I was in a real live music video,” Hurt says regretfully. But then something you don’t see in the videos appears on camera: three drag queens, who confess they love hip-hop and even the aggressiveness of the rappers. They also say they’re in Miami getting laid. “That thug stuff is a front for their boys,” one of the queens says. “Then they get with us on the down low.”

It’s the opening of Hurt’s exploration of the flip-side of rap misogyny—its homophobia and homoeroticism. A Vibe magazine editor confirms the obvious. Of course rap’s homo-heavy, he says, check it out, the whole prison-cell erotica of shirtless men working out together and wearing their pants low for lack of belts.

Busta Rhymes can’t even go there on camera. “You mean talking about homosexuals?” he says incredulous, as if he’s never heard the word spoken in public. “No, man, I can’t even talk to you about that. I ain’t trying to offend no one, but what I represent culturally doesn’t condone it whatsoever. So I’m gonna slide. I’ll be in the lounge,” he says and gets up to leave the studio where Hurt’s conducting the interview.

Wait, says Hurt, “Busta, let me ask you, could a gay rapper ever be successful in hip-hop culture?”

Busta: “Oh, wow…” He looks away and moves to the door, singing. “Pass the Henny and then some/ Say the word and we’re gone.” And he’s literally out the door, Mos Def smiling and shaking his head.

Chuck D is a great interview, predictable but relaxed, his views thought-out and persuasive, especially when placed alongside those expressed by the white fans in the film, who demonstrate the bankruptcy of any supposed cultural awareness brought to white America by rap’s corporate sponsors. A table of white kids in Moline, Illinois, for example, tell Hurt they appreciate rap partly for its anthropological value, the way it provides a look “for us into a completely different culture” that is of course not really a look into anything but a shrink-wrapped shadow world of makebelieve. Earlier, a white guy from Ohio at Spring Bling calls black folk “colored” and is then embarrassed, searching for how to speak to Hurt, a real live black person. He then insists unprompted that he’s not afraid of colored people—displaying good intentions and complete ignorance at once, despite (or because) of his professed affinity for and deep immersion in rap.

The film is excruciating and great like that in a hundred ways, full of the raw material of a cultural moment that signals a shift in consciousness that mirrors a more diverse phase of hip-hop supported by today’s independent means of digital mass distribution, a shift that couldn’t arrive soon enough. Pressed between 50 Cent in his kevlar vest on one side and George W in his crotch-hugging Mission Accomplished flight suit on the other, American manhood has been trapped in one stinky hell of an aggressive prison cell too long—a real rough-trade porno of an era in American cultural history that should have come to its grunting climax long ago.

Hurt’s film airs as this week’s segment of PBS’s “Independent Lens.”