Twelve years back in 2013, during the Sundance Film Festival, I watched Fruitvale later to be called Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler’s heart-throbbing saga about Oscar Grant who was a young man shot to death by Bay Area police even though he was innocent. When the film came to an end, it was apparent that every single individual in the audience was spellbound, and amazed would be an understatement. Coogler without a doubt, was going to make phenomenal films in the future. When he got up on stage, he was exultant which with the response received, but penned down outside perspective through his emotions in his powerful stream of words told us he was already overflowing with the stories he longed to share. As a Sundance viewer or critic, this sequence of events is nothing short of dreamy coming into a film with zero expectations and two hours later witnessing a phenomenal director transform right in front of your eyes.
It’s easy to craft a social justice drama centered around a post-incarceration man trying to reintegrate into society by simply depicting how the system oppresses him. The difficult way the truth-piercing and more artistic way is to show both the unfair uphill struggle and the many ways one can undermine their attempts to move forward. When you do that, you’re not just creating a work depicting a victim’s narrative. You are creating a moral drama, and a drama of self-victimization, and that’s what Rashad Frett pulls off in “Ricky.”
Frett, to put it simply, possesses the full package an acute sense of rhythm and pacing in the building of tension, an eye for mood, for out-of-the-blue or slow-burn violence a spatial awareness of where to place the camera that makes the film voyeuristic while capturing constantly in-motion intimacy an understanding of how to stage action in three-dimensional space so that every character every performer every actor every character responds with their multifaceted motivation and an elusive touch to balance hope, despair, rage, and decency in a way that is achingly true to the grit of contemporary life yet reminiscent of the old Hollywood directors.
“Ricky” is a film that dives deep and lifts one’s spirit at the same time.
When we first meet Ricky, he has only been out of prison for a few weeks. A more traditional director would take at least half an hour to go over the details of a character’s history. But, like the 1970s filmmakers, Frett does not try to explain things with a fake lifelike texture. Instead, he paints the details of Ricky’s background like a masterpiece unfolding before our eyes.
This is how Ricky is as a person, it’s highly unlikely he would narrate what’s going on inside of him. For one, Ricky is quite soft-spoken, and his surly demeanor will further confirm his introversion, meaning he doesn’t talk much even when he has to, and that includes crucial situations. From the onset, he forgets basic procedures, like on multiple occasions missing the appointment with his parole officer, as well as with the group session he is obligated to attend which operates like a twelve-step program for ex-convicts. He tries to showcase he is motivated to avoid prison, so what compels him to take such actions that would sabotage his objective?
Eventually, we begin to understand the backstory that he attempted to rob a store at the age of fifteen alongside his friend Terrance (Sean Nelson) who told him to shoot the cashier. He took the blame, but only because he was charged with the attempted murder of a cashier during a robbery. Imagine being a teenage boy surrounded by violent offenders. The film doesn’t make a blatant statement about the racist undertones of these situations. But it’s fine, it doesn’t have to.
“Ricky” isn’t begging the audience to visualize the ordeal Ricky had to endure, and personally it’s hard to see why someone would put themself in a situation like that.
Ricky is now a blunt soul, someone who more than cannot get by in the outside world. He has navigated life through a lens of suspicion whereby he assumes the worst of everyone around him that is how he survived. Now, he needs to learn a whole new way of being, which the film depicts as a rather complex endeavor.
In a bid to start afresh, he resorts to one of the few skills he picked up in prison Men’s hairstyling. He sculpts cuts that swirl as if they were carved. In this new venture, that is how he first encounters Jaz (Imani Lewis), who happens to be a young mother with a son who needs his hair cut. Although she isn’t the type to take nonsense and doesn’t pretend to like him too much, she is drawn to his quiet strength. In the role of Ricky, Stephan James displays a pensive baby face (he resembles the young Matt Damon), and he is caught between a kind of street worldliness and a larger-world naïveté. He plays every moment beautifully. The character’s thoughts and emotions are written all across his face, which becomes a delicate balancing act. But James is such a compelling actor he draws us into what he can’t say.
Frett composes a roster of characters that make up a community that gives the impression of life, yet is deeply flawed. The filmmaker comes from a Caribbean-American family and was raised in Hartford (which has a Caribbean neighborhood), so while drawing his story out of that background, he brings to life a world that we connect to. Ricky’s radiantly stern Old World mother, played by Simbi Kali, torments in silence for all those years he was taken away. His brother, James, a hot-headed Maliq Johnson, will assist Ricky, but only if it demands minimal effort on his part. Cheryl, Andrene Ward-Hammond’s portrayal of the blowsy ex-offender he meets at his 12-step meeting while appearing so sympathetic and warm turns out so derailed that she dismantles everything. In a performance of diamond-hard crowd-pleasing perfection, Sheryl Lee Ralph plays Joann, Ricky’s ex-convict mother whom he met on parole. An old friend from his mother’s circle, whose sharp turn into fettered Christendom and aggression victimized her as much as it did the Carrie-esque church community, becomes the screws that will try to rein Ricky in. Rickey is her cigar-store wood-chop doll, a hang-bound tragic marionette until she bludgeons Ricky into submission like Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman but with a twist.
“Ricky” has a flowing story, organic in nature and without succumbing to the oppressive indie structure of arcs. To facilitate acceptability into society, one must secure a job, while avoiding the use of narcotics, ex-convicts, and delinquent activities.
And the film explores precisely why that is at every step. It’s not a singular reason; instead, it is like the destiny of cumulative suffering. Without a driver’s license, Ricky embodies a quintessential Hartford walker as he trudges around in a red T-shirt. Yet, he is so dead set on possessing an automobile. And when Mr. Torino (Titus Welliver) attempts to sell his, Ricky quite literally has no choice. Resisting this and much more is simply impossible.
“Ricky” as a film does not deviate from doing the right thing. There are no shortcuts or easier options. It is painstakingly accurate in portraying the consequences of every action Ricky decides to take. But the wave of sympathy people feel for him, against a backdrop of a slowly permeating sense of hope cut through his immigrant roots (his father deported), consumer culture romanticizing criminal behavior, and self-inflicted obstacles is striking. Frett understands how to keep a story compelling from beginning to end and told through unapologetic clarity. That is the mark of a filmmaker who truly gets it.
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