‘Rob Peace’ Review: Risking the Future to Remedy the Past

In the coming-of-age drama “Rob Peace,” from the actor turned screenwriter and director Chiwetel Ejiofor, a promising science nerd from a poor section of Newark must navigate disparate realities: the privileged world of Yale and his private fight to free his father from prison. Jay Will ably portrays the gregarious Rob whose protective mother (Mary J. Blige) pleads with him to put down the burdens of his father (Ejiofor) and focus on his own future. Instead, Rob turns to fast money as a big-time weed dealer to cover legal fees, dogged in his sublimated quest to rescue his father.

The cinematographer Ksenia Sereda adheres to a blend of low angle shots and varying close-ups, and the visuals help imbue Rob with power and vulnerability in equal measure. While the persistent voice-over of Rob reading his graduate school personal essay as narration seems tacked on rather than poignant, all told, the movie delivers a well-earned emotional gut punch that refreshingly does not come from perpetuating the physical and systemic violence it aims to shed light upon.

In deviating from the source material written by Rob’s college roommate, Jeff Hobbs, Ejiofor walks a fine line between blind celebration and sobering truth telling about his protagonist, but he lands more often on the side of celebration. However, flattening some aspects of a more complicated story does effectively lay bare the emotional truth of Rob’s life: His circumstances too often put him in an impossible position. When the film’s version of Jeff says he would never have believed Rob’s story if they hadn’t been roommates for four years, we are indeed Jeff, perplexed by the ever shifting proximity of beauty and tragedy in the life of Robert DeShaun Peace.

Rob Peace
Rated R for language, drug use, violence and mild sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters.