In our new weekly series, we’re revisiting some of our favorite music movies—from artist docs and concert films to biopics and fictional fantasies—that are available to stream or rent digitally. Spoilers ahead.

On Mary J. Blige’s “Seven Days,” the singer is having a conversation that takes every ounce of her energy to finish. All at once, she is drenched in pain, indecision, love, and affection. It’s a classic Mary J. record—smoky vocals over warm neo-soul production that could just as easily be rapped over—but what sticks in the listener’s mind is the story: a platonic friendship that becomes something more. “I never thought that I would fall in love with you/But since the day we kissed I knew it had to be you/I never thought we would be together/I can’t believe I just made love to you,” she sings, like her heart is falling out of her chest.

Screenwriter Michael Elliot heard “Seven Days” on the radio in 1998. The self-taught scribe, then on the verge of giving up, wrote one of its lyrics down on a napkin: “Now what are we gonna do?” That lingering question became the end of the first act of Elliot’s new script, arriving after a kiss between two longtime friends. He sold the movie, initially titled Seven Days, to 20th Century Fox for $250,000.

Meanwhile, Rick Famuyiwa was a young director coming off his first hit, 1999’s The Wood. Set in Famuyiwa’s hometown of Inglewood, California, the semi-autobiographical film put its own spin on various trends in 1990s black cinema, pulling from Boyz n the Hood as much as Love Jones. Through flashbacks, The Wood is a coming-of-age comedy where the characters are reluctantly involved in a crime; in the present, it balances romance and the bond between three friends. With Famuyiwa’s fresh voice that mixed heaviness with humor, the studios naturally eyed him for a full-blown romantic comedy. Enter Seven Days, soon to be retitled Brown Sugar.

Like nearly every rom-com since 1989, Brown Sugar was pitched to its director with a When Harry Met Sally reference. The defining difference was its setting within the professional ecosystem surrounding hip-hop. Famuyiwa tweaked the script and cast The Wood alum Taye Diggs and Sanaa Lathan in the starring roles. Both Diggs and Lathan had established themselves as signature romantic leads of the late ’90s/early ’00s—Diggs with How Stella Got Her Groove Back and The Best Man, Lathan with Love & Basketball—though their dominance is often diminished, since rom-coms with primarily black casts are rarely shown the same love as white ones.

Brown Sugar is laid out like a typical romantic comedy—it hits all the familiar beats. Arriving in 2002, when hip-hop was more mainstream than ever before, the movie could have easily been an attempt to capitalize on a pop culture moment while sticking to the rom-com formula. But with great care shown to both the music and the characters who exist within its world, the story becomes something more: real people hanging out, with hip-hop naturally ingrained in their lives.