Movie review by Greg Carlson
An intuitive and energetic coming of age drama that trades the Val Melaina neighborhood of Vittorio De Sica’s Rome in “Bicycle Thieves” for current day Richmond in the Bay Area, Justin Tipping’s “Kicks” marks one of the year’s most memorable features. Tipping’s directorial debut, “Kicks” hovers over the shoulder of teenager Brandon (Jahking Guillory) through an incident that quickly escalates to a series of choices that lead to mortal consequences. Operating at times like “Boyz n the Hood” realized by Larry Clark, “Kicks” also shares several points of thematic kinship with geographical sibling “Fruitvale Station.”
Like the trio of Doughboy, Ricky and Tre in John Singleton’s classic, Brandon is joined by close friends Rico (Christopher Meyer) and Albert (Christopher Jordan Wallace) as he navigates his day-to-day. Hoping that some fresh red and black Air Jordan 1s will lead to instant success, confidence, and appeal to potential romantic partners, Brandon tracks down a pair only to have the shoes taken from him in a humiliating beat-down just a few hours later. What follows is Brandon’s evolving odyssey to reclaim his sneakers, and Tipping laces the sense of compounding doom with interstitial screenshots of key song titles that complement the narrative as prophetic chapter stops.
With scant exception, Tipping deliberately omits older generations of institutional representatives and authority figures, a bold decision that infuses Brandon’s world with an almost surreal touch of dark fatalism. Calling to mind the same kind of wiser-than-their-years quasi-adulthood of the “Peanuts” gang, the absence of mothers, teachers, and police officers thrusts the young inhabitants of “Kicks” into an accelerated maturation process necessitated by their compressed life expectancy.
Instead of traditional elders, Tipping layers two of the film’s most important supporting characters with markers of patriarchal responsibility. In one of the movie’s most welcome surprises, predatory antagonist Flaco (Kofi Siriboe) challenges stereotype as a single father to a young son. Tipping insists that we see Flaco’s love for his child (even if that love manifests in a cascade of painful “lessons” that imply the perpetuation of violence), just as we are made to examine the parallel path of Brandon’s uncle Marlon (a riveting Mahershala Ali), who in one chilling scene comforts Brandon’s mute grandmother while discussing “business” with his nephew.
Unfortunately, the level of perspicacity that Tipping shares with the various circles of young men does not extend to the women in “Kicks.” While the males are constantly communicating and interacting with one another, females are primarily objectified for purposes of sexual gratification. In the sole extended sequence in which multiple women speak and interact, the object of Brandon’s desire – whose tender age is alluded to by an older minder – engages him with an easy hook-up. Tipping’s intent might have been to focus attention on the insidious ways that dire codes of masculinity govern a universe with a very precise concept of what it means to be a man, but in some ways, that very message might have been even more effectively conveyed had “Kicks” carved out some room for feminine voices and agency.