Movie Review - All Day and a Night

Joe Robert Cole is a 40-year-old, Hollywood writer who got his start back in 2006. He doesn't have a lot of credits to his name, but he's an Emmy nominee for his work on The People v. O.J. Simpson (2016). However, most people will know him as being the co-writer on Black Panther (2018), one of the highest-grossing movies domestically of all-time. He is a director too and this is his second feature. His debut was a very different film than this one. It was a suspense film, a psychological thriller of sorts. This film, however, felt more like a throwback to 90's black cinema. Back in the 90's, Hollywood studios were distributing various films about African-Americans living in the inner city and dealing with crime. That era of films were in ways an extension of the blaxploitation time period of the 1970's, but filmmakers like John Singleton made it a bit more serious with films like Boyz n the Hood (1991). There were films like Juice (1992), Menace II Society (1993) and Jason's Lyric (1994). All of them depicting the struggle for black people in poverty and in the so-called ghetto.

For the majority of the 2000's, mainstream Hollywood has shied away from those kinds of stories on the big screen. With this film, Cole is doing a throwback to those 90's films. His film feels like a relic at times, but the argument can be made that 30 years later, African Americans are still dealing with the same issues in the inner city as back then. While Cole's film might feel derivative, it's still very much relevant. Unfortunately, I think that Cole is doing what many films do, either successfully or not, and that's tell two stories and deal with two things at the same time. Some films and filmmakers can juggle the two things or the two stories. Some can't. I fear Cole might be in the latter category.

Ashton Sanders (Native Son and Moonlight) stars as Jahkor Lincoln, a young black man in Oakland, California. The opening of this film shows him committing a horrible crime. How it goes down, it seems so evil a thing that he does. The film then splits in half. One half of the film goes back a year or so and depicts the events leading up to Jahkor committing the crime. The other half of the film continues forward and depicts the events after the crime where Jahkor is in prison. So, we get two stories, the pretext to the crime and the aftermath of which. Both can be compelling stories in the life of this one, young man, but I don't think Cole balances those two stories here all that well.

There was a film last year called Waves (2019) by Trey Edward Shults that did a similar thing. It tries to tell two stories, concerning a young black man who commits a horrible crime. What Shults was trying to do was different than what Cole is trying to do here. Shults wasn't trying to juggle. His film makes a pivot that I think didn't work, but, in a similar sense, I felt like Shults' film collapses under its own weight. Cole's film doesn't collapse as things just hit the floor, less dropped as bluntly thrown to the ground to shatter.

Jeffrey Wright (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Casino Royale) co-stars as JD Lincoln, the father to Jahkor and a drug addict. He seems like a guy who does some petty crimes, maybe even some drug dealing himself. On the outside, he seems very abusive toward his son, and he is, but a more inward view might show that his is a very tough love because he wants to toughen his son and prepare him for life on the streets. Jahkor's mother sees this as defeatist and she wants her son not to have a life on the streets. Unfortunately, JD's influence is too strong and she's fighting a losing battle.

What is surprising is that JD is already incarcerated by the time that Jahkor gets there. When Jahkor first enters prison, his voice-over narration says what is the most damning thing in this whole film and that's the presence of so many black men in prison from the same family. In fact, whole bloodlines are in prison. Fathers and sons are locked up together. The film then dives into the standard and predictable, prison violence. At the end though, the best thing is Wright's performance as a father looking almost in horror or fear of what his son has become and what JD himself has wrought. In just one moment, Wright is devastating.

Getting to that point though is rough. I was hoping that this film would be an all-black version of Starred Up (2014). Yet, that's not the case. It had that potential, but it didn't quite rise to that level. Wright is good in his scenes in prison, but I would've liked more from him, so that we could've gotten the full arc of his character, going from a guy preaching tough love to the guy looking at horror at the result of that tough love.

Rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and some sexual content/nudity.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 1 min.

Available on Netflix.