Bleecker Street
Anytime you’re doing a ‘based on a true story’ movie it’s always a tricky thing to feel like you’re giving the real world material justice while also reasonably providing a watchable narrative in under two and a half hours. On top of that if you also want to do an ‘issue’ sort of movie it’s even trickier because you also need to feel like you aren’t steamrolling your point across either — a balance that’s very tricky to pull off.
Breaking comes from director Abi Damaris Corbin and co-written with Kwame Kwei-Armah, based on the 2018 Task & Purpose article ‘They Didn’t Have to Kill Him’ by Aaron Gell. We follow Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega), a former Marine and veteran with a wife and daughter at home who is unemployed and basically living on a small disability check from Veteran Affairs every month.
But one month he is refused his check due to some reason he isn’t told about and he feels quickly that he’s running out of options. So one day he heads into a local Wells Fargo in Atlanta and informs the teller, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva), that he has a bomb. But despite that, he tells them he is uninterested in hurting anyone and only waits when Rosa and other employee Estel (Nicole Beharie) are the only ones still there.
Whether or not he even has a bomb isn’t answered in the final moments of the movie, but we already strongly suspect he’s completely bluffing because it’s just a principle for him at this point. It gets a little confusing for a while because he’s no professional hardcore criminal, and eventually he realizes he wants to talk to both a hostage negotiator and the media to spread his message — that he really just wants what’s owed him, just around $800 and nothing more that his family needs to survive.
So for much of the rest of the movie we follow conversations between Brian and journalist Lisa (Connie Britton) as she tries to figure out what went wrong at the VA, and also police Eli (Michael Kenneth Williams in one of his final roles) and his partner who is a random white dude in the context of this movie (Jeffrey Donovan).
The actual research isn’t really the most compelling stuff, but instead the more interesting aspects of the movie are the horror and confusion inside the bank as the employees connect with Brian despite being terrified of him. It’s certainly a great series of performances there, especially from John Boyega as the desperate man and Nicole Beharie as the scared employee who still empathizes with the complicated situation.
Unfortunately the specter of reality hangs over everything, and we know that a tragic outcome is inevitable, and the movie doesn’t really interrogate it further than that, leaving us instead with a sad, empty ending. As one of those ‘issue’ movies I mentioned, it has a functional, capable quality and certainly has some great acting in it.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone ‘enjoying’ a movie like this outside of the film-critic or similar type, and it’s not really at the top of the class of even those sorts of movies, just a decent entry in them. I still do respect the effort at trying something so difficult though.
Breaking has a run time of 1 hour 43 minutes and is rated PG-13 for some violent content, and strong language.
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