A dozen years ago, at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, I sat in the Eccles Theatre and watched “Fruitvale” (later entitled “Fruitvale Station”), Ryan Coogler’s true-life drama about Oscar Grant, a young man who was fatally shot by Bay Area police, even though he had done nothing. By the time the film ended, everyone in the audience knew that we’d seen something straight-up extraordinary, and that Coogler was a born filmmaker. When he got up on stage, he was ebullient — grateful for the response, but you could also see, as his words poured forth, that he was already bursting with the stories he wanted to tell. This, for a viewer (or critic), is the Sundance dream: to go into a film you know nothing about, and two hours later you’ve witnessed a filmmaker — maybe a great one — being born.
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I felt a similar set of emotions today when I sat, once again, in the Eccles and watched “Ricky,” Rashad Frett’s drama about a young man from East Hartford, Conn., named Ricardo Smith (Stephan James), who has just gotten out of prison and is struggling to find his way in a world that seems booby-trapped.
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The easy way to make a social-justice drama about a man who has been incarcerated and is trying to go straight is to demonstrate that the system is stacked against him. The tough way — the laceratingly truthful and artful way — is to demonstrate how the system is designed as an uphill climb, at times unfairly, but also to dramatize the layers of self-sabotage that can be encoded in someone’s actions. When you do that, you’re not just making a drama of victimization. You’re making a moral drama, and that’s what Rashad Frett brings off in “Ricky.”
Frett, let me say this simply, has got it all: a gift for pace and tension and mood, for violence that can erupt out of nowhere or after a slow boil; a sixth sense for where to place the camera, so that the film is always drawing in your eye with a weaving, bobbing, voyeuristic intimacy; the gift for staging a scene in three dimensions, so that every character quivers with his or her own complex motivation; and the ability to mingle hope and despair and rage and decency in a way that, while staying true to the grit of contemporary life, chimes with what the filmmakers of Old Hollywood did. “Ricky” is a movie that plunges into the depths and also lifts the spirit honestly.
When we first see Ricardo, known as Ricky, he has been out of prison for just a few weeks. A less imaginative director would have taken maybe half an hour to fill in the basics of his background. But Frett, like the filmmakers of the ’70s, is so committed to establishing a lifelike texture that he doesn’t stop to explain things. He dabs in Ricky’s backstory like a painting we’re watching come to life.
Ricky himself is not someone who’s about to explain what’s going inside him. He’s quiet and a bit surly, turned inward, not given to speaking his mind, even when the situation demands it. Early on, he messes up protocol several times, appearing late for an appointment with his parole officer and skipping the meeting — a kind of 12-step confab for ex-offenders — that he’s required to attend. He lets us know that he doesn’t want to go back to prison. So why is he making it more difficult for himself?
It takes a while before we start to piece together what happened to him: how he robbed a store with his friend, Terrence (Sean Nelson), when he was only 15, and on Terrence’s instruction shot the cashier, and then took the fall, going to prison for attempted murder. He was a 15-year-old boy thrown into the joint with violent criminals. (The film makes no explicit point about the racism of that; it doesn’t have to.)
We can hardly imagine what Ricky went through, and “Ricky” doesn’t ask us to. But it shows us what Ricky has become: a blunted soul, someone who doesn’t merely lack the skills to negotiate life on the outside. He has grown up learning to survey everyone with suspicion, with his guard up, assuming the worst; that’s how he survived. He needs to learn a whole new way of being, and the film doesn’t make that look easier than it sounds.
He’s got one skill, learned in prison, that he’s trying to make a go of: He’s a wizard at cutting men’s hair, sculpting cuts that swirl as if they were carved. That’s how he first meets Jaz (Imani Lewis), who has a young son whose hair he offers to cut. She takes no guff, and doesn’t pretend to like him too much, but his quiet solidity appeals to her. As Ricky, Stephan James has a pensive baby face (he resembles the young Matt Damon), and he plays every moment beautifully, caught between a kind of street worldliness and a larger-world naïveté. He lets us read his thoughts, which is the high-wire way to play a role like this. But James is such a compelling actor that he keys us into what he can’t say.
Frett creates a roster of characters who make up a flawed community that feels like it’s been torn from life. The filmmaker is of Caribbean American descent and was raised in Hartford (where there’s a Caribbean community), and drawing his story out of that setting, he brings alive a world that we connect to: Ricky’s radiantly stern Old World mother (Simbi Kali), who has lived in torment for all the years her son was taken away; his brother, James (Maliq Johnson), a hothead who will help Ricky out if it doesn’t require too much effort; Cheryl (Andrene Ward-Hammond), the blowsy ex-offender he meets at his 12-step meeting, who seems sympathetic and inviting, until we see a side of her so unstable that it messes everything up; and, in a performance of diamond-hard crowd-pleasing perfection, Sheryl Lee Ralph as Joanne, Ricky’s parole officer, who’s an old comrade of his mother’s (at least, until she was cast out of the church for her sexuality), and who is going to set Ricky straight as if she were the hanging-judge version of Louis Gossett Jr. in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
“Ricky” has a story that flows, organically, without submitting to the tyranny of indie “arcs.” To make his transition into society, Ricky needs to hold a job, and to stay away from drugs and felons and trouble. And the movie shows us, at every turn, why that’s so incredibly difficult. It’s not any one reason — it’s more like the karma of generational trauma. Ricky, who has no driver’s license, has to walk everywhere in Hartford, schlepping for miles in his red T-shirt. But he desperately wants a car, and when Mr. Torino (Titus Welliver) offers to sell his, he can’t resist. There’s too much that he can’t resist.
As a movie, “Ricky” never cuts corners or takes the easy way out. It’s perilously real about the stakes of every decision Ricky makes. Yet our desire to see him triumph in a world where the odds have been stacked against him — by his immigrant background (his father was deported), by popular culture that sells crime as glamorous, by his own screwups — is palpable. Rashad Frett knows there’s no contradiction between telling a story that absorbs us to the end and doing it with searing honesty. That’s the definition of a born filmmaker.
