The second movie in a month to see some Oakland friends struggling beneath the oppression of racism and classism, Blindspotting makes a fine companion piece to the fantastic Sorry To Bother You but never reaches that picture’s oddball heights in either comedy nor commentary. Written by childhood pals and stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, the film follows the last few days of probation for Diggs’s Collin, who had a brief stint in jail after a violent altercation when he was a bouncer. He’s trying to stay out of trouble, but that’s made harder by his best friend Miles, the ghetto Dignan of this Bay Area Bottle Rocket, who buys a black market gun and tries to drag our long-haired lead straight from institutionalized living to stupid crimes. (Beyond Bottle Rocket, Good Will Hunting and Shaun of the Dead are also known landmarks in this strange genre where a male lead and his old friend co-write a film about outgrowing a fuck-up bestie.) But Collin has an even bigger problem: out past his curfew, he sees a cop shoot an unarmed black man multiple times in the back, and he’s afraid to speak up for, well, pretty valid reasons.
The shooting echoes throughout the film, both in Collin’s avant-garde, sometimes-trite nightmares and in the repeated pops of unexpected, harrowing violence that interrupt what’s often a casual buddy comedy. The juxtaposition is jarring, but it’s often effective and holds a lot of truth. Real-life traumatic moments don’t usually occur across contrived dramatic arcs; they punctuate the daily life of joking around with your friends. Blindspotting‘s high-stakes ordeals deal with a lot of very timely, very heavy issues, and there’s an inherent earnestness to the film’s chumming around that sometimes borders on amateurish but holds its own weight, giving a unique voice to Oakland’s rapidly gentrifying streets. This all builds to separately intense, satisfying climaxes for its leads, but with both the melodrama and comedy often as groan-worthy as they are successful, getting there in the pair’s moving truck could go a lot smoother.
Grade: B-
Blindspotting
Director: Carlos López Estrada
Studio: Lionsgate
Runtime: 95 minutes
Rating: R
Cast: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ethan Embry, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Wayne Knight, Kevin Carroll
