For a few moments, it feels as if Laurence Fishburne might really let fly.

"We're in a period where mediocrity rules the day," he says, his deep voice a controlled boom. "There's a lot of stuff that's not good that's touted as being good."

He pauses.

Like what? Speak, brother, or give me the ocular proof, as Fishburne's Othello (he was the first black actor to play the tortured Moor in a major film) commanded Iago. The fullness of his silence foreshadows authority in his words.

He leans back. His laugh fills the lobby of Washington's Ritz-Carlton hotel. He sucks his teeth. "Nooo," he says, finally. "I can't do that without hurting anyone's feelings."

He is in town to promote his new movie, "Akeelah and the Bee," which opened yesterday. Instinct urges you: Push, press, ask the question once more, but you do not. Because Fishburne's "no" feels like no all day long and into tomorrow. It feels like his disdain for fraudulence and unseemly reporter appetites might land you on his bad side — like there are volcanoes inside this dude, and the last thing you want is for Laurence Fishburne to go all Morpheus on you.

No, best to let it alone. Besides, the actor/writer/director/producer smiles his coolly wicked smile, and has no shortage of considered things to say.

In "Akeelah and the Bee," Fishburne, 44, plays a former college professor named Dr. Larabee, a mentor and father figure to a brilliant 11-year-old inner-city Los Angeles girl with a gift for words that rallies her neighborhood and carries her to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The movie is a drama about friendship and competition and the seldom-seen interior world of a little black girl who must learn to fill out her canvas. To keep her community's most affirming textures, but get beyond all the neighborhood things that conspire to keep black girls small.

It's a different theme for a predominantly black movie these days, one Fishburne says is more authentic and evocative of the places black people remember, like his old neighborhood in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

His parents divorced before he was born. He mostly lived with an emotionally uneven mother who clung, and poured into her son her aspirations for high art and fine things. His disciplinarian father lived in the Bronx, and moviegoing was the main feature of their monthly visits. Laurence acted in his first stage play at 10; the next year he was a regular on the soap opera "One Life to Live"; a few years later, he was making movies. Then he was in the Philippines with Coppola, Brando, Sheen, Duvall, Hopper.

He has often brought to his portrayals the tics and trembles and poses of the people he hung with around the way. That placeness is something Fishburne says spoke to him about "Akeelah and the Bee."

"I fell in love with it," he says. "It's an honest portrayal of black contemporary life." And just think — Hollywood doesn't think audiences want to see any of that, he intones darkly.

His anger is the sheet music to a riff about a film industry that often frames the whole of black life between pathologies:

"The things the studio makes a place for, the gangs and pimps and hos and guns and killing and (expletive) doesn't negate the fact that there is a real need for death and birth and relationships and jobs and struggle and Grandma's house and life." And even a spelling bee, he says.

Fishburne goes in and out of those kinds of rhythms often. His broad, 6-foot-plus frame is all coiled potential energy until it's all fluid kinetic grace, until he leans forward, nods, pounds his fist.

You can't just go with what's in style, he argues. "You've got to tell some stories. Take a (expletive) stand! Say what you want to say! Be honorable about your (expletive)!"

It's the volcano thing. There's an appropriately propulsive quality to his curses that he uses to let you know just how deeply he feels about all this (stuff). It's part of being a black man in Hollywood and staying in your right mind. "I have a standard, and it has nothing to do with money," he says.

After "Apocalypse Now," he appeared in three more Coppola films in the 1980s: "Rumble Fish," "Cotton Club" and "Gardens of Stone." He was the thoughtful campus radical Dap in Spike Lee's "School Daze." In the 1990s, he was Jimmy Jump in the crime drama "King of New York" and a breakout star as the vigilant South-Central Los Angeles father in John Singleton's "Boyz N the Hood." Critical acclaim kept pace and Larry Fishburne became Laurence Fishburne, or reclaimed Laurence, or was always Laurence but now insisted on it in the credits — whatever, you mess with him about it if you want to.

He won a Tony Award for his Broadway stage work in August Wilson's "Two Trains Running." He won an Emmy the following year, and in 1994 he was nominated for an Oscar as the complicated, magnetic, wife-beating musician Ike Turner in "What's Love Got to Do With It." His recent work has been dominated by his portrayal of the enigmatic, omniscient Morpheus in the "Matrix" trilogy.

Fishburne has talked about "swing" in his performances, the notion of finding the right range and rhythms and notes for a character, and then swinging hard. "I mean it in the exact sense that jazz musicians mean it," he told the New Yorker in 2004, describing the kind of swing he wanted for "Riff Raff," the 1995 play he wrote based on characters from his Brooklyn childhood.

Some movie stars are unwilling to bend their pretty faces to put out for a role. Fishburne, who isn't pretty but exudes a sexiness born of cool and command, doesn't do movie star. He goes where he must to be true to the scene. Even if it twists his face ugly; even if it shows up as unmasked anguish, as it does on the face of Dr. Larabee.

"I carry a lot of feminine energy as well as masculine energy, and that's the hit that people are getting," Fishburne explains. "That vulnerable thing is not what we assume with black males. You get it and then they cease to become scary. They become human. You cease to have a bogeyman."

HARD-TO-SELL STORY LINE

For years, writer-director Doug Atchison shopped his script around Hollywood. He had been captivated watching a national spelling bee on ESPN in the mid-1990s, and in 2000 his script was one of five winners of a competition sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — but for years, he couldn't get it made into a movie.

"People are allergic to doing what they've never seen," says Atchison. They hadn't seen a black girl who wasn't an athlete carry a film. Studios wanted to make the Dr. Larabee character white, but Atchison resisted. "That story had been told too many times, and it was important to reconnect Akeelah with her community. She had a negative impression of where she came from, and Dr. Larabee came from her own world and had gotten his Ph.D. This gave her the belief she could do it."

Fishburne signed on to produce and act in the project in 2004 to help get it made. Atchison echoes his sentiments about the Hollywood shuffle.

"When's the last time you've gotten a movie with a black family that's a drama and you can take your whole family?" Atchison asks. "When was the last time you saw a movie about a black youth that's not singing or dancing or playing sports? When was the last time you got a movie where the black mentor character was a Ph.D.?"

At the Ritz-Carlton, Fishburne seems not to notice people noticing him. Seems not to care if they are looking at him to try to see Morpheus. He knows he'll be remembered for Morpheus. "But that's not all I'll be remembered for," says Fishburne. "Some people's first introduction to me will be as Dr. Larabee," he says. "That's what they're going to remember in 20 years."