‘Love, Brooklyn’ evaluation: Vivid, imperfect love letter to a borough

A young metropolis romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings collectively interesting actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into mushy focus. It feels just a little too fastidiously organized to ever actually get beneath your pores and skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

First-time characteristic director Rachael Abigail Holder’s cinematic postcard to loss and mutability is a gorgeous tableau of aged brownstones and new sizzling spots, canopied streets and hilly parks. It’s additionally well-anchored to what producer-star André Holland — enjoying a blocked author named Roger juggling relationships with two sturdy ladies — does finest: a charismatic, deer-in-headlights unhappiness. However the film stays in that postcard attract, by no means fairly edging its earnest expressions of need and nervousness into something extra stakes-driven or detailed, the best way a love letter would possibly rattle and console concurrently.

First seen biking his metropolis’s streets day and night time with a becalmed sense of possession, Holland’s Roger is a die-hard Brooklynite none too proud of the smoothing over of his cherished neighborhoods by “obscene” cash. It’s a subject that animates him over a boozy, chatty candlelit dinner with gallery proprietor Casey (the luminescent Nicole Beharie), herself wrestling with the way forward for a struggling enterprise that’s been in her household for generations. Pleasant exes, Roger and Casey have a teasing rapport. They’re additionally maybe not completely over one another.

Roger’s indignation over gentrification isn’t sufficient, nevertheless, to encourage him to satisfy a deadline on what he now considers a disingenuous, assigned piece on the “evolving” Brooklyn. He’d fairly reply the nightly name of weed-enhanced intimacy with therapeutic massage therapist Nicole (DeWanda Clever), a not too long ago widowed single mother. Frank and playful, she likes their informal association and doesn’t thoughts her inquisitive daughter (Cadence Reese) realizing mommy has a brand new buddy, however between the traces, Nicole additionally hints to Roger there’s an opportunity to deepen issues.

Written by Paul Zimmerman, “Love, Brooklyn” is the kind of triangle by which everybody’s job thematically aligns (a tad neatly) with all of the speak of whether or not to look again or transfer on. Promoting artwork sits on the nexus of outdated methods and prosperous new tastes; masseuses expose strain factors; and to jot down is to attempt (and try to attempt) to make sense of all of it. Even Roger’s pal Alan (the dryly humorous Roy Wooden Jr.), a bored husband who lives vicariously by his buddy’s romantic entanglements, echoes the story’s emphasis on which-way-to-go paralysis. He additionally has one of many script’s higher traces about Roger’s indecision relating to Nicole and Casey: “‘The entire above’ shouldn’t be a solution.”

However the place Holder’s delicate, location-rich course leaves room for the type of trustworthy, orienting drama we crave from this state of affairs, the screenplay is finally too bland and nonspecific about its characters’ lives to maintain us engaged. It’s as if the film have been trapped in a limbo between the slick universality of a Netflix romcom and a bone-deep micro-indie with all of the smarts and feels.

It’s left to the solid to do the perfect gross sales job with this underdeveloped materials. Holland, on the heels of his stellar flip within the underappreciated character examine “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” could make you neglect how little we all know of Roger’s background, so magnetic is his prickly, awkward emotional confusion. He has unbelievable scene companions too in Beharie and Clever, who exude an enviable maturity navigating their characters’ emotions about Roger, compartmentalizing their damage in a manner that, when it rises to the floor, feels suitably poignant. They’re a fascinating trio that one needs had been given more difficult connective tissue than the unfastened narrative grid of “Love, Brooklyn.”