'BLACK PANTHER' WRITER GETS BEHIND THE CAMERA.
ASHTON SANDERS, LEFT, AND JEFFREY WRIGHT PLAY A SON AND HIS FATHER IN “ALL DAY AND A NIGHT.”
At one point near the end of the Netflix film “All Day and a Night,” a young man offers to teach his father a little about gardening. “Come on, old man,” says Jahkor. “Let me show you how to grow something.”
In another movie, such a gesture of familial fellowship might not seem all that out of the ordinary. In this tense, moody and violent character study, it’s a shred of humanity worthy of celebration.
The lean, severe “All Day and a Night,” the second film from director and “Black Panther” co-writer Joe Robert Cole, is set in the black neighborhoods of Oakland, Calif., but unlike other recent movies about the African American experience in the Bay Area — “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Blindspotting” — it has no elements of fantasy or a warmly romantic nostalgia for a vanishing black way of life.
Gentrification is the least of the problems for Jahkor, Jah for short, portrayed by Ashton Sanders, who played a young version of the main character in “Moonlight.” The closest he gets to the tech-bro, Silicon Valley dream is a job at an athleticshoe store in a white neighborhood.
Born into a poor household with an abusive, drug-addicted father (Jeffrey Wright, “Westworld”) and weaned on the mefirst philosophy of classmate and drug dealer TQ (Isaiah John), stoic and glacier-cold Jah has little empathy or compassion for anything beyond his immediate desires and the vague dream of being a successful rapper.
The film, told in a nonlinear style, opens with him blowing away Malcolm (Stephen Barrington), a rival to the local crime lord Big Stunna (Yahya AbdulMateen II), to whom Jahkor has pledged his loyalty. But even pulling this off seems to give him no true satisfaction as he grimly goes about a life that has less to do with living and more to do with base survival. The one thing he won’t do is sell drugs after having seen what they did to his dad, but taking a life means little to him.
Both father and son end up on the same path into the maw of the criminal justice system as inevitably as flooding after a Texas thunderstorm.
Sanders is memorable as Jah, a kid both hurt and hurtful, for whom all joy has been ransacked from his life. Somewhere inside there’s a heart, but it has been calloused over by disappointment and disillusionment. And Wright, of course, always brings a forceful presence to whatever role he plays.
Cole, who also wrote the script, approaches Jah’s rudderless existence almost as if it’s part of a documentary. The shots of the parties in Oakland’s streets — with drivers dangerously drifting and ghosting (in which a driver gets out of a slowly moving vehicle to dance alongside the car) — feel as if they could have come out of a news report.
Ultimately though, there is a sense of renewal stirring inside Jah. Whether it flowers or wilts remains to be seen, but after spending two hours with him, viewers will be rooting for the former. “Let me show you how to grow something,” indeed.