Sitting next to Stew at a lodge outside Park City last Friday on the day of the premiere, Mr. Lee said that he saw the musical at the Public and had a visceral, immediate response.  “When you are a young black kid, you see three options,” he said, tearing into a salmon filet while he talked. “You can be a rapper, a baller in the N.B.A. or N.F.L., or end up slinging drugs on the corner. But being an artist? C’mon.” Mr. Lee, 51, became a filmmaker when there were few role models, so watching a musical about a young man who riffs his way through church choir, punk rock and an Amsterdam and Berlin sojourn on his way to becoming a rocker hit him hard.  “I was blown away,” Mr. Lee said. “It knocked me out, and I told everyone I knew. I brought my wife back, I told Wesley Snipes, I told everyone, but the thing that killed me is that I know a lot of very hip black folks in New York, and you know what, for whatever reason — marketing, maybe because it had a lot of rock and roll, no R&B, no hip-hop — they never heard of it. But if it wasn’t for Bo Diddley and Little Richard, there wouldn’t be such a thing as rock ’n’ roll.”  “Passing Strange” is a bit of a corrective, a reminder that historical tropes are just that: old news. Stew and Mr. Lee had their eyes very much on the presidential inauguration on Tuesday, not just for what it means for the country, but also for what it means in terms of knocking down notions of what black people want or care about.  “I mean, look at what’s on Obama’s iPod,” Stew said. “He’s lived abroad, he’s interested in all kinds of music and all kinds of things. I get really tired of what is expected of a race or a people. All kinds of people want all kinds of things.”  “I can remember the shock when ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ came out,” he added, referring to Mr. Lee’s 1986 film that took the notion that black women just danced in attendance to men who always seem to be players, and flipped it. “I knew every single type of person in that movie, but those people had never been on screen before.”  “Same thing with the play,” he added. “You’ve seen this kid before, but never in a play.”  Mr. Lee, who is not generally short on demands on his time, said the decision to turn his camera on “Passing Strange” was a simple one.  “I wanted to meet the crazy genius who put this together — I had to know him — but more importantly, I had a really personal connection to a lot of the elements in the story,” he said. “I thought that making a film about it seemed like a way to make sure the most people saw what this guy had accomplished.”  Stew, 47, whose full name is Mark Stewart, has already accomplished a great deal. “Passing Strange” was nominated for seven Tony awards and won best book in addition to two Obies and a Drama Desk Award. Given its history at the Sundance Institute Theater lab in 2004, it is a sweet turn that it ended up back at the festival that bears its name five years later.  “We’re thrilled,” said Robert Redford, sitting in a booth at Zoom restaurant in Park City. “We worked with Stew a lot because it was clear that he was enormously talented and that he had a wonderful story to tell. And now to have Spike here with the film is a remarkable moment for the festival.”  Stew said that after the musical was commissioned by the Public, pairing him and his partner, Heidi Rodewald, with the director Annie Dorsen, he went to the theater lab, where he began to write seriously. “I had been a songwriter,” he said, “but I came here, I had a room with a view, a desk and a deadline.”  Mr. Lee said that having a songbook serve as the bones of a narrative has its perils, “but this guy had lived a life.”  “He had something to write about,” he added.  In his storied career as a filmmaker, Mr. Lee has made big movies and little movies, indies and studio, flops and hits, but has never been to Sundance before now. Grabbing some lunch before the premiere in a white Yankees cap trimmed in fluffy white fake fur — “I’m not taking a poll, I’m just trying to stay warm” — he just shrugged when he was asked how that might be. “Just never happened.”  From under the brim of his fedora, Stew riffed a bit as he spoke of their joint presence here in a place known for Mormonism and snow. “He and I, just by being here, have had an impact on the black people demographic in Utah.,” Stew said. “You know those signs that say, ‘Welcome to Utah’ and list the population? They added a few little black squares in our honor. They’re going to take ’em off when we leave.”
The musical “Passing Strange” is back, this time as a filmed version of the live show, directed by Spike Lee.