by MATTHEW HAYS

African-American novelist Donald Goines wrote 16 crime books in his short life. In 1974, but four years after serving time on various charges, Goines completed his final novel, Never Die Alone. Within months he was shot dead.

Watching director Ernest Dickerson's feature adaptation of the book, it's rather amazing to consider that this is the first time anyone has thought to bring Goines' work to the big screen. His choice of topics begs for cinematic treatment: there are gangsters, illicit drugs, guns and girlfriends. What's more, with Goines' own brushes with the law, the whole affair is given an added sense of authenticity.

The film begins with a brush-up between several drug dealers. As the scene unfolds, shots are fired and knives are pulled. King David (played by rap star DMX) gets sliced and is losing blood by the pint. By luck, David Arquette happens to be nearby, and takes DMX to the hospital - to no avail. What DMX leaves behind, though, are a series of clues to the amoral drug-dealing life he led. Arquette listens to a slew of tapes which serve as voiceover to tumultuous flashbacks, indicating just how rotten DMX had been.

Also unfolding is the labyrinth that was this drug dealer's existence. With this book, Goines was (rather obviously) pointing out the distinct possibility that karma exists in the universe (pretty ironic, considering the author would die at the end of a gun within months of writing it).

Never Die Alone isn't the best movie I've ever seen, but I must say, it's refreshingly handled. This could so easily have descended into the kind of cheap, nasty, pseudo-MTV hip hop posturing that many films along this line do. Instead, Dickerson (who began as a cinematographer, working on Spike Lee films like She's Gotta Have It and Malcolm X) keeps things moving at an entertaining pace while never being too flamboyantly stylish. Like I said, not the greatest movie ever, but the unusual Never Die Alone did leave me pleasantly surprised: a taut and gritty African-American film noir based on bestselling pulp.

Never Die Alone opens Friday, March 26

>> Movie Listings