Youth’s legal nightmare painfully real
“Crown Heights” begins with Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” a scene-setting snippet of music to establish Colin Warner as a struggling 18-year-old in the early 1980s.
He’s close to the edge — stealing a car not long after we meet him — but he’s not guilty of murder. Warner is grabbed by police, thrown into jail, and the music stops. The young man’s life, and the movie it inspired, become hyper-focused on the byzantine legal nightmare waiting like a trap for inner-city youth.
Matt Ruskin’s film is about atmosphere as much as the actual events. His directorial choices give the viewer an
unrelenting experience — devoid of montages, obvious feel-good moments, soundtrack cues and other cliches that inhabit more mainstream legal and prison dramas.
“Crown Heights” has some narrative shortcomings. But the filmmakers respect the subject matter too much to ever take the easy way out. It’s close in tone to the challenging “The Night Of …” HBO miniseries, requiring an initial emotional investment, before yielding its rewards.
Lakeith Stanfield is solid as Warner, a real-life immigrant from Trinidad who was convicted of a 1980 murder in Brooklyn, even though the evidence was ridiculously thin. When overworked public defenders and immoral appeals attorneys let him down, it was up to Warner and best friend K.C. (Nnamdi Asomugha) to keep the case alive.
Asomugha’s performance would be remarkable, even if he wasn’t a star for Cal and a two-time All-Pro defensive back with the Oakland Raiders. In “Crown Heights,” K.C. is our tour guide on the streets to encounter the hopelessness, personal sacrifice and collateral damage that follows a crime — even a twodecade-old one. (The pain from this hasty injustice extends to the haunted men who were coerced into identifying the wrong shooter.)
K.C. is so dogged that loved ones wonder if he committed the crime himself. Why else would he feel so much guilt? Working off Ruskin’s tight script to presents K.C. as more of a co-lead than a supporting player, Asomugha inhabits the part with dignity and nuance.
With a 94-minute run time, other supporting characters are more two-dimensional, including the women in Colin and K.C.’s lives. Lawyers and prison inhabitants get seconds of screen time. Exceptions are veteran stage actors Bill Camp and Sarah Goldberg as William and Shirley Robedee, who show some compassion for Colin’s situation.
“Crown Heights” is adapted from a “This American Life” podcast, and the transition to cinema results in some inconsistent pacing. Warner’s first six years in prison fly by too fast in just a few sequences, and then the researchheavy ending starts to drag. It’s a courtroom drama that runs out of courtroom scenes.
But that’s a credit to the filmmakers as well. They respect this material, and real-life innocent people who have been incarcerated, too much for a heavy fictionalization. “Crown Heights” is a challenging film with long treks between uplifting moments. And there’s no question the film earns every moment of grace.