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Brandon (Algee Smith) is having a hard time with adolescence. His single mother Janice (Sanaa Lathan) is on the verge of eviction and is in an unhealthy relationship with her children’s father Lamont (Mike Epps). Brandon also was let go from his job and is having a bit of a hard time in school.
At home he’s forced to take care of his two younger siblings when his mother is absent and steers them clear away from their father who Brandon knows is a bad influence. It’s not the life a teen should endure, but one fateful day inside of a convenience store, all of that changes when Brandon meets Cassidy (Sierra Capri) who robs both Brandon and the store owner at gunpoint.
Mid-robbery, Cassidy looks over at Brandon and, along with a manipulative glance, kisses him on the lips and leaves the store. While both Brandon and the store owner are unharmed, that day will forever change the trajectory of Brandon’s story and carve out a new path for his journey on this weird trip called life that he’s been struggling with lately.
What we learn from meeting Cassidy is exactly what the title of this film illustrates — that she’s young, wild, and free. This free spirit opens Brandon to a world filled with no inhibitions — a world where you can be who you are and not think about the consequences. While living a life with no scruples may seem enticing and liberating, the results of these actions can lead to some dangerous repercussions.
Actor Sanaa Lathan, whose incredible performance this past year in On the Come Up was criminally ignored, once again pulls an extraordinary depiction of a single parent in low-income housing struggling to keep her family intact. Hopefully, her performance here will get some attention, as Lathan has impeccable range as a performer and can flawlessly perform in any genre.
However, the film doesn’t come without its shortcomings. Now I didn’t find many, but one particular character had a movie flaw that was just plain annoying. Cassidy is cute, fun, and quirky. However, the incessant movie references she delivers throughout the film were pointless. She speaks through movie metaphors, which unfortunately comes off a bit too cliché for my taste as this has become a bit of an overused trope in cinema. Using a film protagonist to reference a movie quote, whether it’s a tool used for nostalgic purposes or it’s the writer letting their movie geek flag wave a little too high, feels a bit overdone in my opinion. This was my one gripe with her character as I just felt it was an unwarranted component to her idiosyncratic personality. As the plot evolves, it doesn’t benefit the character as to why she’s developed this way, but I digress.
That being said, what I did find remarkable about this story and its narrative is how Brandon and Cassidy’s relationship is formed. The synergy between these two makes sense even if it’s a bit rough around the edges. Here’s how this makes sense: Cassidy is feeling validated by giving Brandon the freedom that he is seeking and Brandon feels empowered and in control of his life for once. And even though what Cassidy teaches him breaks the boundaries of ethics in various situations she pushes him into, it doesn’t matter to Brandon because he’s finally fulfilled. His hunger is satiated and he’s no longer struggling … to some extent anyway.
However, all good things do eventually come to an end.
Known for writing a number of shorts, director Thembi L. Banks makes her directorial feature debut at Sundance with Young. Wild. Free. The writer/director’s most notable work is on the HBO series Insecure as a director and as a writer on the hit Emmy-nominated series Only Murders in the Building where she’s also credited as a producer.
The coming-of-age story of Young. Wild. Free. isn’t Banks’ first rodeo as a writer/director touching on teens dealing with an identity crisis. In her short film Suitable, which streamed on HBO as part of a list of short film awards finalists, the story featured a high school tomboy who comes to terms with her sexuality when she decides what she’ll wear to the prom. A fun fact about another film among this list of short film awards finalists — the short Emergency, directed by Carey Williams — inevitably turned into a feature length film that also premiered at Sundance in 2022.
The beautifully crafted story of Young. Wild. Free. takes you on an incredible journey and veers you off-course to an unexpected plot twist that you won’t see coming.
Young. Wild. Free. is written by Thembi L. Banks and Juel Taylor (Creed II), from a story by Taylor and his They Cloned Tyrone co-writer Tony Rettenmaier. The film is produced by Macro Film Studios’ Charles D. King, James Lopez and Poppy Hanks, Confluential Films’ Tommy Oliver and No Label Productions’ Baron Davis. Sanaa Lathan is also an executive producer on the project.
The film premiered January 22 at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and will be playing through the rest of the festival, which ends January 29.
Writer-director Adura Onashile makes her feature directorial debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival with Girl, the story of a mother-daughter bond put to the test as the daughter feels more and more drawn to the outside world. Named a Screen Star of Tomorrow 2021, the British-Nigerian filmmaker is best known for the BAFTA Scotland-nominated short Expensive Shit, an adaptation of her 2016 play previously featured in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Set in Onashile’s home of Glasgow, Scotland, the film tells the story of 24-year-old Black immigrant mother Grace (Déborah Lukumuena) and her 11-year-old daughter Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu), who obsessively keep to themselves in their small apartment in a council estate. They have each other, but there’s still a sense that they’re both lonely separately.
Grace tells her daughter not to trust anyone or draw attention to herself, but Ama’s inherent curiosity leads her to break the rules. When she’s alone in the apartment, she spends her time by the window looking into apartments across the way, observing the different lives of the people she can’t connect with.
Grace reluctantly lets Ama attend school, which visibly makes Grace anxious. Throughout the film, we see abstract flashbacks to when she was a young girl in another country. The only thing we know is that whatever happened was so traumatic that it still affects and dictates her life, resulting in her intense protection of her child. The fear and anxiety that she’s passed onto Ama are palpable in just about every scene. We’re not sure what the current threat is, but we simultaneously feel Grace’s panic and Ama’s confusion and frustration.
At times, it seems like Grace doesn’t want the responsibility of being Ama’s mother, but her moments of anger stem from a deep love and desire to protect her at all costs. Despite the strict limitations she imposes, Grace creates a faraway fantasy for Ama, often recounting the fictional tale of the two finding each other. The story is repeated by both mother and daughter like a reminder that even though things are bleak now, their origins sprung from a magical place. Onashile told Screen Daily that she always wanted to show “how beauty can exist in spite of fear and danger.” That juxtaposition creates a complex situation for a burgeoning 11-year-old to navigate.
One bright spot in Girl is the innocent friendship between Ama and her neighbor/classmate Fiona (Liana Turner). Their joy shines through despite the mundane, sometimes sad surroundings, a less extreme version of the girls fleeing the tense situation at the motel and going to Disney World in The Florida Project. Meanwhile, Grace experiences frequent panic attacks that lead to outbursts directed at anyone trying to help her, such as Danny Sapani’s Samuel.
Grace, played by French actress Déborah Lukumuena in her first English language role, is a complicated character riddled with flashing dark images of her past. She’s nearly agoraphobic, only feeling safe in their home even though it’s incredibly claustrophobic. The constant sound of outside voices that permeates the insular world of their apartment is suffocating. But after a while, it becomes the norm, and for Grace, the noise allows her to stay hidden among others. It could also remind her that the more people around them who could pose a threat, the more they’re ultimately unsafe. Still, she feels strength in anonymity.
Composer Ré Olunuga’s (Rise) music elevates the film’s hybrid tone of sorrow and whimsy. From the beginning, there’s a chorus of harmonizing voices playing over the sounds of everyday life. Coupling the music with the visual intimacy from cinematographer Tasha Back (Hunger), the film’s overall feel is haunting and atmospheric. Back uses close-ups to dig deeper into the mindset of the introverted characters, showing us the details they see in each other. Their skin is lit beautifully as well. During the day, it’s mostly natural light; all the colorful lights of the city illuminate nighttime, particularly the streets of Glasgow as Grace commutes to her overnight job.
The small cast delivers powerful performances, especially Lukumuena and newcomer Le’Shantey Bonsu. Onashile’s extensive experience as a theater actress likely makes her an actor’s director. Given the heavy subject matter and closeness of the relationships, there’s a vulnerability that’s demanded of both characters. Those performances become most authentic through working with a compassionate, supportive director.
Girl is a coming-of-age drama about the life-altering effects of one person’s trauma and the difficulty in keeping it from infecting others. Adura Onashile favors the impressionistic over the explicit, leaving the audience to fill in the blanks. We’re given such little information about the looming threat perceived only by Grace that it makes us lean into every moment waiting for a big reveal. It creates a completely immersive, claustrophobic experience.
Girl has its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on January 22. The film was recently selected to open this year’s Glasgow Film Festival in March.
Watching Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Hulu-produced documentary series The 1619 Project, based on a series of New York Times Magazine essays by Hannah-Jones and other writers turned into a bestselling book, I am reminded of two other literary instances.
I think first of Shakespeare’s King Lear, who, after having learned of betrayal by his daughters Regan and Gonorill, cautions himself that he can’t bear to think too long about the implications of such a familial double-crossing. “That way,” he warns himself, “madness lies.”
Second, I think of a minor character in Richard Wright’s Native Son. In that novel is a Black man who has apparently gone mad in his quest to uncover the full extent of white dominance over Black Americans. “You’re afraid of me!” the man shouts in a jail cell. “That’s why you put me in here! But I’ll tell the President anyhow! I’ll tell ’im you make us live in such crowded conditions on the South Side that one out of every ten of us is insane! I’ll tell ’im that you dump all the stale foods into the Black Belt and sell them for more than you can get anywhere else! I’ll tell ’im you tax us, but you won’t build hospitals!” The man goes on until he’s told to pipe down. Eventually, he’s straitjacketed and carted away, never to be heard from again.
Watching this six-part documentary series, I began to feel a little like Lear raving at the wind and Wright’s “mad” character discovering more treachery than he previously thought feasible.
And it’s not that much of the information is news to me; it’s that, once it’s all packaged together in a six-hour series, enlivened by interviews and supported by countless pieces of evidence, the information becomes a burden, a reification of my knowledge of Good and Evil, with extra emphasis on the latter. In short, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project is an exquisitely informative downer, but there’s enough hope and strength throughout to make it an almost necessary watch.
The series, like the essays and book that came before it, tackles several subjects that have seemingly most affected Black American descendents of chattel slavery since that first group of enslaved Africans was deposited on colonial Virginia’s shores in 1619. These topics range from the deadly serious, like fear, race, and justice, to the near-benign, like music and democracy. Each topic is afforded an episode to cover it, and the thesis is generally this: chattel slavery of Black bodies was this nation’s original sin, and postlapsarian America does not have many institutions or cultural exports that were not in some serious way affected by it. Indeed, Hannah-Jones’ narration tells us “almost nothing” in America has been left untouched by the legacy of slavery forged in 1619.
Each episode begins with a topic and then traces its genealogy back to slavery, taking time to observe how everything done in the past has implications on the present. In this way, the series closely follows William Faulkner’s adage that the past is never dead. As he says, “it’s not even past.”
Episode 1 deals with American democracy, tracing Black people’s involvement with civic duty — as much as it is available to them at any given point in time — from Reconstruction-era Constitutional amendments, to Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement, to the current fight for voting rights in the 21st century. While giving an overview of past hardwon struggles concerning who is a true citizen of this nation as shown by their ability to vote, the episode also takes a close interest in following Black Georgians fighting voting laws recently challenged as discriminatory by the Justice Department.
The documentary as a whole is a personal project in every sense, for each episode also has Hannah-Jones looking at how Black history has affected her and her family. In the first episode, she wonders how her father, an Army veteran, could have maintained his patriotism despite being born on a sharecropping plantation in segregated Mississippi. She wonders how he could have shown so much deference for the flag, making sure the family’s own stars-and-stripes was flown every day and kept in immaculate condition.
Her confusion about this is shown to be valid, as this episode shows us the efforts of Macarthur Cotton working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s to register Black Southerners to vote. We see how, just for attempting to get a county with a majority Black population to have more than 5% of that population on its voter rolls, Cotton ends up imprisoned and tortured in conditions that would make the jailers at Guantanamo Bay blush. Hannah-Jones tells us, “It is Black people who have been perfecters of our democracy,” but our role in democracy’s improvement has left scars, both on the psyche and the flesh.
The following episodes, “Race,” “Music,” “Capitalism,” “Fear,” and “Justice,” follow similar beats: a present problem is presented, its foundations in Black debasement are explored, and the audience is enlightened on the steps taken to ameliorate it in the past and today.
The one episode that strays from this slightly is “Music,” which is the most openly celebratory of the bunch while still noting the pervasiveness of white co-option and appropriation of Black music. “Music” comes midway through the series’ run and is, at least for me, a wonderful reprieve from seeming onslaught of facts that must be addressed but are often painful to acknowledge.
The episode that might prove to be the most divisive, however, is “Capitalism.” The thesis here is that, in America, race is inextricable from capitalist exploitation, and this is most obviously illustrated by race-based slave labor creating much of America’s early wealth. The controversy may end up being sparked because, while it is very easy to say racism is bad, to say capitalism is bad, especially in America, stinks of communism. It is redolent of a radical leftism that even Democrats over 30 are suspicious of for its proximity to — gasp! — socialism. The book version of The 1619 Project caught flak from conservatives who hated its racial messaging. This episode might divide left-leaning people who have differing views on wealth redistribution, the efficacy of socialism, and the morality of American capitalism.
The 1619 Project should be shown in classrooms, but it probably won’t be. Many things that should be are not. The project as a whole is controversial because it dares to question the American “bootstraps” shibboleth that places blame for wealth inequality, shocking infant mortality rates, and mass incarceration on individuals rather than institutions.
I can’t say this is the most formally innovative documentary I’ve ever seen, but the content, as brutal as it can be at times, makes the viewing worth it. Yes, that way lies madness, but it’s worse to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
The 1619 Project premieres Thursday, January 26, 2023, on Hulu.