“Detroit Unleaded” is a remarkable concept. The city’s morbid state has been well documented recently. Just like that, small storefronts operated by immigrants within American urban ghettos have become a staple in hood flicks but more often than not, they are portrayed from the consumer’s perspective. This indie comedy aims to take us into the heart of crumbling Detroit and behind the bullet-proof glass of a gas station convenience store.
The problem here is one of pace, rhythm, and information density. The best films of this subgenre including Do the Right Thing “Car Wash” and “Friday” all have it. They have a furious visual pace that races around both the convenience store and its surroundings. But, just like the best films of this subgenre. Do the Right Thing Car Wash and Friday this piece suffers from a lack of information density. Neighborhoods simply aren’t energizing like Chris Tucker’s Smokey, nor as iconic in their insanity as Bill Nunn’s Radio Raheem. The filmmaker’s cart is outrunning a lazy horse.
That could be excused if, in fact, the romantic leads in the story, Sami (EJ Assi), a Lebanese-American son of a gas station chain, and Naj (Nada Shouhayib), an attractive Arab-American cellphone shop assistant, had fireworks of passion together or approached the challenges to their love with something more than just indifference. They seem to be cute and likable teenagers, but a friend of mine who worked as a mall greeter summed their general vibe by saying of Assi, He’s good-looking enough to be in a movie, oh wait, he is in one. The film forgets it, too, serving us tidy cutesy snippets that look like they belong to an NBC sitcom pilot.
What is missing is what this movie sorely lacks sexual, racial, cultural, and class While scores of Scandinavian urban types toffee into Sami’s shop, director Rola Nashef does not even bother to make, a simple story, anything more than a passing thought of their drama and restlessness exasperate this twenty-something who has to commute from the suburbs of Dearborn to a what can only be described as purgatorial job that made him drop out of college. Then there is the other under-researched strand of grudging admiration that exists between mostly black strivers hustlers working stiffs and their Middle Eastern counterparts.
There is a hint of extreme violence in the beginning of the movie which points to an even darker form of black comedy, that I believe might come later. There is a constant sense of no real emotion or nuance in Assi’s performance. Above it all, Nashef is concealing a strong and deeply needed multicultural perspective. What I hope is that the next time she comes back to tackle this project, she will have more ambition. Her vision feels so clouded in this sketch of a movie and needs to come out with more force.
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