‘Ricky’ Review: A Sensitive Stephan James Steadies Frenetic Debut About Recidivism
In Barry Jenkins’ oneiric adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Stephan James plays Fonny, an incarcerated sculptor wrongly accused of a crime. He enchants from the moment we see him on screen: When his character talks to his girlfriend (KiKi Layne) from behind a glass wall, James communicates the severity of carceral rupture with his anxiously clasped hands and melancholic gaze. The actor’s expressive eyes, often emphasized by furrowed brows, tell stories when words fail his character.
Language often fails Ricky, the protagonist of Rashad Frett’s meaningful but uneven feature debut. The 30-year-old Hartford native, portrayed with soulful precision by James, has just been released from prison. Life on the outside is a challenging obstacle course and Ricky, who was incarcerated at 15, understandably struggles to navigate it. He suffers from anxiety and PTSD, as relayed through scenes of fitful sleep and muted sound as he enters states of agita. Sometimes, when Ricky can’t find the words, he wraps his arms around his head, as if burrowing himself away from an overstimulating world. James plays Ricky with revelatory thoughtfulness. He relies on those emotional eyes to tell a parallel narrative, reframing post-incarceration life as a kind of coming of age.
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Ricky, which premiered at Sundance and is based on Frett’s short of the same name, chronicles the difficulties previously incarcerated people face once they re-enter the world. Like last year’s Sing Sing, Ricky offers audiences an intimate perspective on a sliver of the American justice system. The United States has some of the highest recidivism rates in the world: Current numbers show that, among people released from state prison, roughly 80 percent are rearrested within 10 years. Working with his co-writer Lin Que Ayoung, Frett crafts a compassionate portrait of how one man stays free. But Ricky struggles with underbaked narrative threads and breathless direction that can verge on unfocused.
The parts of Ricky — whose tone and style will likely draw comparisons to Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station or John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood — that stick are those in which Frett observes impediments, both material and psychic, to his protagonist’s attempts to settle into the world. There’s a gritty quality to these scenes, emphasized by the shaky camera and off-kilter angles (cinematography by Sam Motamedi), that effectively translates the frenzied awkwardness of Ricky’s adjustment.
The formerly incarcerated, particularly those with felony charges, are stigmatized by a society whose idea of justice prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation. Ricky’s current job at a warehouse, where he loads and unloads packages, is jeopardized by mandatory background checks. His parole officer Joanne (a transformed Sheryl Lee Ralph) stays on his case about attending group therapy sessions and regularly subjects him to drug testing.
Then there are the intangible losses, the ones that make you realize that Ricky is still a boy. James’ sensitive performance helps usher in this realization. He relies on understated physical cues like those anxiously clasped hands he showed us in If Beale Street Could Talk or wrinkling his brows when Ricky feels most vulnerable. These moments are most pronounced when he confronts an old friend (Sean Nelson) about why he was in prison, asks his younger brother (an excellent Maliq Johnson) for driving lessons or flirts with women — first with Jaz (Imani Lewis), a single mother he meets in the neighborhood, and then with Cheryl (Andrene Ward-Hammond), another formerly incarcerated person from his group therapy.
Despite James’ anchoring performance, most of Ricky is unsteady. The weaknesses mount as Frett expands our understanding of this world. Juggling too many subplots shortchanges narratives like the one concerning Ricky and his neighbor (Titus Welliver) and a suggested history between Ricky’s mother (Simbi Khali) and Joanne. Other women — Jaz and Cheryl, for example — struggle to be more than foils here, especially as Ricky moves toward its devastating climax.
A tonal dissonance trips up the film, which, in its attempt to say something important, slips toward indecisiveness. Frett’s empathetic gaze gets hampered by an overly emphatic effort to land lessons. What the message implies is a bit questionable, too: After showing us all the ways society fails its character and other formerly incarcerated people, Ricky ends on an odd note of personal responsibility. And while there is something to be said for making better decisions, it helps, as Frett has confidently already shown us, to understand the circumstances that render that nearly impossible.
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