The death and ostensible resurrection of the great American city of Detroit has been the subject of so many feature pieces of journalism over the last 10 years (at least) that an outsider might be inclined to believe those events are recurring in a sort of temporal loop. The actual experience of living there day in and day out is credibly conveyed in the director Andrew James’s documentary “Street Fighting Men.”
Eschewing interviews and even identifying titles, James interweaves portraits of three men. James “Jack Rabbit” Jackson is a retired cop who keeps neighborhood watch in an area blighted by break-ins and vandalism. Luke Williams is working on restoring a vacant home, but is short on money and resources. Deris Solomon, a new father, wants to get off the street and stick to the straight and narrow for the sake of his child. The religious leader Malik Shabazz, who was the central figure in James’s short film “Community Patrol,” is also seen here.
From the beginning there’s an undercurrent of weariness, of the wear and tear of living in a place to which the rest of the world — or rather, the movie strongly implies, the white world, the money world — has grown indifferent. “Tired of being a superhero?” a friend asks Jackson over coffee. A harsh winter and an instance of sabotage — or is it just paranoia? — provide a major setback for Luke. The death of the founder of the Young Detroit Builders program devastates Deris.
It’s not a dismissal of this movie to say that its narratives are familiar. That’s more an indictment of the society that produces such scenarios. What makes the movie compelling, then, are not so much the stories that ebb and rise from despair to hope, like the tides, but the portraits of the people living them.
Street Fighting Men
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on OVID.tv and Vimeo On Demand.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
