This is a masterful film that goes to the core of what it means to ‘belong’ in today’s rapidly changing world. The script, delivered in a flowing, lyrical form, is sharp, visceral and funny. The acting is sincere and unaffected. The themes it engages with are real and pressing. In all, essential viewing.
Blindspotting is set over three days in the lives of Collin (played by Daveed Diggs, of Hamilton fame) and Miles (played by Rafael Casal, of Def Poetry fame), as they navigate racial prejudice and rampant social change in their hometown of Oakland, California. The story is at least partly inspired by the real-life experiences of Diggs and Casal, longtime friends who grew up in Oakland, and co-wrote the film.
Early in the first act, Collin witnesses the shooting of a young black man at the hands of a white cop — an explicit reference to the #blacklivesmatter movement, and the unending police violence against young black men in America today. He is visibly scarred by this experience, and as the film progresses, we watch as his eyes are opened to the true extent of institutionalised racial prejudice — or, ‘blindspotting’ — in his midst.
In one particularly powerful moment, Collin is stunned when Miles’ son jokingly pleads ‘don’t shoot, don’t shoot’, raising his hands in self-defence. The episode forces Collin and the audience to ask themselves: is this really the plight of young black men in America today, growing up in fear of being shot, so powerless that they must only surrender when threatened?
In contrast to Collin, Miles displays a raw anger from the very start of the film — impulsively lashing out at every marker of gentrification, from $10 green juices and vegan hamburgers, to hipsters at fancy house parties. In a manner that is both ironic and artistic, Miles and Collin are at once each other’s antagonists. Collin repeatedly stumps up $10 for a hipster juice – reinforcing Miles’ frustration at gentrification. Likewise, Miles is continually having to prove his ‘blackness’ in order to fit in, a challenge that Collin never has to face.
Conversely, Miles’ frequent displays of anger, and his nonchalant attitude towards gun possession, only serve to remind Collin of the restraint he must display in the same situations — a freedom of expression denied to him simply by virtue of the colour of his skin. What Collin and Miles share is a deep anger at a sense of lost identity — a feeling of powerlessness and helplessness at the hands of others, invading their territory, appropriating their culture, devaluing their existence. “Every time you come around you monsters got me feeling like a monster in my own town”, Collin rages, as he confronts the white cop in the film’s nail-biting climax.
Blindspotting shines a razor-sharp light onto the ills of racial prejudice and gentrification, adeptly depicting just how profoundly disruptive these forces are for the individuals and communities they inflict. The protagonists remain permanently on the edge of explosion, easily provoked to anger and at times bloody violence. To demonstrate the depth of emotion evoked not just by racial prejudice, but also gentrification and cultural change, is one of the film’s achievements. At the same time, this is a beautiful story of friendship — the only constant in the protagonists’ metamorphosing world.
If the film is to be faulted at all, it is in the at times forced depiction of its key themes: every scene seems to entail an encounter with another marker of ‘hipsterdom’. The film is also inevitably one-sided — potential social and economic benefits of gentrification are not seen through the eyes of Collin and Miles. Ultimately, though, these are features rather than bugs of the film, intended to reinforce the message of social injustice, and the importance of culture, identity and community. At a time of rapid social change, persisting social inequality, and the populist anger that has arisen in response, Blindspotting is timely and important work.