‘Summertime’ soars with lyrical millennial magic
From “Blindspotting” director Carlos Lopez Estrada comes the lyrical, semimusical, spoken word “Summertime” and it’s a West Coast “In the Heights” and a more diverse “La La Land.” The action begins with a girl on roller skates strumming a guitar on the pier in Venice, singing of “our city’s story” as she literally runs into some of the film’s ensemble.
Later, we meet hip-hop sidewalk performers Anewbyss (Bryce Banks) and Rah (Austin Antoine), whose rise from rags to riches is meteoric and who rap about their mamas. On a city bus, feisty passenger Mila (West Coast Youth Poet Laureate Mila Cuda, who also served as poetry editor) poetically stands up to a hater, delivering a self-affirming, subversive and frequently funny — “I’m so gay” — soliloquy.
But not all the people in the film are so well adjusted or happy to be themselves. In fact, this Los Angeles is more a city of broken young people, yearning young people, young people full of selfloathing, as well as a tagger kid named Jason. Marquesha (actor and writer Marquesha Bebers) wants a shallow young man who broke her heart to know what it feel like to be her.
Paolina (writer and actor Paolina Acuna-Gonzalez) recites a brilliant ode to red lipstick, while her table’s red dress-wearing wait person multiplies into a platoon of red-dressed dancers, performing synchronized moves on a Los Angeles street. A pair of lovers about to break up rhapsodize to a therapist about their mutual betrayals.
The language in “Summertime” is a form of rapturous expression. It can be full of rage, as it is for Sophia (Maia Mayor), who is spying on her ex. In the kitchen of a Korean restaurant, the cooks find exaltation in song and improvised dance.
The “Summertime” budget is modest. It looks like it might have been shot on a phone at times (it wasn’t.). But its millennial heart is big. “Summertime” gives us the illusion of a single day in the life of a teeming metropolis, complete with various forms of street art, including a montage of giant murals and a mariachi band.
Breakout star Tyris Winter, who wears a big chain on his hip and communicates in Yelp reviews, is on a quest for the perfect cheeseburger, which is tied mysteriously to painful recollections of his childhood home.
In the end, all the players pile into a 30-foot limo and ride high into the hills to see Los Angeles in its entirety sprawled out and gleaming beneath them. The cast is a bunch of youthful poetry slammers assembled by Estrada and his producers, including Kelly Marie Tran, to celebrate the City of Angels.
Like Jacques Demy’s New Wave landmark “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Summertime” is an experiment, and like Demy’s experiment, Estrada’s takes flight.
(“Summertime” contains profanity and sexual references.)