Movies

Notorious B.I.G. Nas. A Tribe Called Quest. Wu-Tang Clan.

These acts arguably form the Mount Rushmore of East Coast hip-hop, and if you were a high school kid in the summer of 1994, there's a strong chance that their beats were either flowing through your headphones or bouncing in your car.

That was the case for Jonathan Levine, the 32-year-old director of The Wackness, which opens Friday at the Magnolia Theatre and the Plano Angelika. In the film, Mr. Levine tells a coming-of-age story set in Manhattan during that sweat-soaked summer, about a recent high-school graduate named Luke (Josh Peck) who sells pot to fund his impending college education. Along the way, he trades weed for therapy with a psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley) and falls for the doc's stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby, Ellen Page's pal in Juno).

All the while, the sounds of some of hip-hop's seminal beats and rhymes fill the air. Just as the pop tunes in films such as Stand By Me, GoodFellas and last year's American Gangster place the viewer in a specific time period, the music in The Wackness is as important in setting the scene as the clothes and dialogue. And whereas most pop-flecked soundtracks feature of-the-moment artists hoping to sell a few songs on iTunes, Mr. Levine has carefully curated a lineup of rap's golden oldies that lends credibility to his film.

Sony Pictures Classics

The Wackness star Josh Peck was 7 when the music featured in the movie was defining hip-hop. A crash course in the music helped him build his character.

"Beyond what worked tonewise, a lot of it speaks to what's going on in the movie," Mr. Levine said during a visit to Dallas last month. "There's that 'Heaven & Hell' song [by Raekwon] when Josh is up on a water tower looking down, and it's asking, 'Is high school heaven or is it hell?' And 'Can I Kick It?' [by A Tribe Called Quest] plays when Kingsley's trying to kick drugs. So a lot of it just kind of worked thematically."

Mr. Levine targeted the most iconic acts of the era, with Notorious B.I.G. on the top of his list. Luke and Stephanie bond in Central Park over beer and the sounds of his classic debut album, Ready to Die . "The What," a song from that album featuring Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man, who also appears in the film as Luke's supplier, leads off the soundtrack.

"Right before we start shooting, I said to the music supervisor: 'We need Biggie. Before we even start shooting, we need Biggie,' " Mr. Levine said. "We reached out to the Biggie estate, and they were very gracious to us. That would have been the one that if we hadn't gotten it, we couldn't have a movie."

Shortly before debuting at January's Sundance Film Festival, the movie secured a deal with one of the pre-eminent hip-hop labels, Jive Records, giving Mr. Levine additional freedom in choosing the music. In doing so, he's created a soundtrack that viewers often single out before even discussing the plot. (The film played at both South by Southwest and the AFI Dallas International Film Festival this spring.)

One convert to the music was the movie's star, Mr. Peck. The actor best known for Nickelodeon's Drake and Josh was a wee 7 years old during the summer of the film's setting, and though he says he is a rap fan, a crash course in the music of the times helped him build his character.

"I got to New York about a week before we started shooting, and I just listened to East Coast hip-hop the entire time we were making the movie," Mr. Peck, who grew up in Manhattan, said during his Dallas visit. "KRS-One, Notorious B.I.G., Nas – they were speaking about a time and place that was inherent to the movie, and I felt like especially for Luke, these guys were talking about a struggle that he was very much entrenched in and aware of. And so it was necessary for me to really feel that connection with the music."

Mr. Levine says he considered expanding the film's sonic landscape to include Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins, two of the year's biggest non-hip-hop acts, and that the original ending featured Nirvana's "Lithium."

Ultimately, tough choices refined the film's reach, which isn't such a bad thing. But that doesn't mean it was easy passing that other music up.

"There's this great R&B like TLC and this pop music of the time – even bad pop music like Counting Crows and Hootie and the Blowfish – all of that would have been fun to include as part of the texture of the era," Mr. Levine said. "But we only had 90 minutes, man. ... I'll do another movie in 1994."