“Luce” smartly deals with topical issues
“Luce” begins as if it’s going to be just another thriller — albeit a very intriguing one.
Luce (a fantastic Kelvin Harrison Jr.), the black high-schoolage son of adoptive white parents, seems to excel at everything. He wears success like a new sweater and is not only the valedictorian of his class but also is a key member of the track team, has friends across the racial divide and is beloved by all of his teachers — except for one.
History teacher Harriet (Olivia Spencer) parrots the party line about how wonderful a young man Luce is, but she doesn’t really believe it. Conversely, he’s the height of congeniality around her but views her with thinly veiled contempt. There’s bad blood between these two, and it’s hard to discern at first why. Whose side to take? A kid who seems just a little too full of himself or a teacher who might be nursing a grudge the size of Texas? (And after her against-type role in the thriller “Ma,” who knows what horrors Spencer’s characters are up to these days?)
But director/co-writer Julius Onah (“The Cloverfield Paradox”) has no interest in making “Luce,” based on a play by J.C. Lee, simply an interpersonal horror story. Instead, “Luce” is a drama that gets entangled neck-deep in some of today’s thorniest topics — race, class, sexual assault, immigration, potential terrorism — without becoming too heavy-handed or turning characters into onedimensional heroes and villains.
As it turns out, Luce just isn’t any kid. He’s a former Eritrean child soldier whose earnestly liberal American parents — Amy (Naomi Watts) and Peter (Tim Roth) — raised him from the age of 7 in the lap of relative upper-middle-class, northern Virginia luxury. Amy seems to be especially aware of the pressure of raising a young black man in contemporary America and bristles at any criticism of him.
That’s not Harriet’s story. She is an old-school African-American teacher who knows what it’s like to struggle to get hers. Her emotionally troubled sister (Marsha Stephanie Blake) is totally dependent on her, and they live together at the bottom rung of the lower-middle-class ladder.
Harriet tries to show her black students tough love to prepare them for the hostility of the outside world and doesn’t tolerate any lawlessness. She even got a student, a friend of Luce’s, kicked off the track team for having drugs in his locker to prove her point.
So after Luce turns in a paper in the voice of Frantz Fanon, the West Indian and Pan-Africanist philosopher/revolutionary who called for violence against colonialists, and fireworks are found in his locker, Harriet thinks her suspicions of Luce’s armor of perfection are justified. To top it off, there are rumors that members of the track team assaulted a female student (Andrea Bang) at a drunken party, and Luce may have been involved. Does the criminal heart of a manipulative child soldier still beat beneath that well-groomed, Obama 2.0 exterior?
This pits Harriet against her principal (Norbert Leo Butz, so good in the series “Bloodline”), who likes to leverage his school’s reputation with Luce’s success story, and Luce’s parents, especially Amy, who becomes a lioness in defense of her son. Yet her rage reflects not just what would be expected from any mom but also white guilt and the growing realization that her life’s parental good deed of rescuing a child from a presumably bleak African future — which she thought had awarded her with the type of child others would envy — might be bearing fruit more bittersweet than she ever imagined.
Meanwhile, Luce is stuck in the middle. Genius? Role model? Criminal? Terrorist? He becomes a three-dimensional Rorschach test of young black men.
Harrison has been an actor to watch in a variety of projects — from the streaming series “Start Up” to Houston director Trey Edward Shults’ post-apocalyptic nightmare “It Comes at Night” — but his turn in “Luce” is as star-making as any celestial big bang. But he’s not the only impressive one. Spencer, Watts and Roth are strong, though it’s Blake who is an unexpected force to be reckoned with in the film’s hardest-to-watch scene.
“Luce” doesn’t offer easy answers and, thanks in part to former Portishead linchpin Geoff Barrow’s glitchy score, keeps viewers constantly offbalance, like a night of heavy drinking. It may not be a thriller in the conventional sense but that is what makes it so thrilling.