Justin Chang, LA Times
Something similar can be said of Ashton Sanders, the mesmerizing 23-year-old actor at the center of “Native Son.” This debut feature from the visual artist Rashid Johnson is the third screen adaptation of Richard Wright’s landmark 1940 novel about Bigger “Big” Thomas, a young black man from Chicago’s South Side whose life of desperate poverty and privation takes a cruelly violent turn.
It is the first adaptation, however, to update its story for the present, a choice that, conceptually, requires both boldness and subtlety. Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, this “Native Son” means to trace a direct line from the systemic injustices and persecutions experienced by African Americans in the 20th century to those they continue to endure in the present. The result is a strangely potent but muddled brew: It’s urban realism with a boldly anachronistic streak, a sly comedy that tilts into tense, brooding tragedy.
Sanders, so memorable as the teenage Chiron in Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” similarly magnetizes the camera’s gaze as Big, a skeletally thin young man who lives with his mother (Sanaa Lathan) and two sisters in a poor and comically rodent-infested Chicago apartment. Big’s very look is a calculated provocation: dyed-green hair, dark glasses and a black leather jacket with the words “Or Am I Freaking Out” scrawled all over it. His identity, while still slippery and unformed, has clearly been shaped to his detriment by a society where black men are expected to know their place.
An opportunity arises when he gets a job as a chauffeur for the Daltons, a white family living in a tonier part of town, and gets to know their teenage daughter, Mary (Margaret Qualley). Their scenes together — especially on the town, where the reckless, Mary brings Big into her circle of hard-partying friends — are written and played with darkly satirical verve. But after a grisly, intensely harrowing set-piece midway through, the story’s narrative and thematic possibilities feel increasingly limited by its faithfulness to its source material. We know from the outset that tragedy is inescapable, but even still, the movie seems to be narrowing just as it should be getting more expansive.
The largely appreciative reception to “Native Son” got its own twist early in the festival: HBO Films announced that it had acquired the movie from A24, meaning it will air on the premium cable channel and bypass theaters. That’s too bad, insofar as the picture is more than anything a triumph of atmosphere, beautifully framed by the versatile cinematographer Matthew Libatique (a current Oscar nominee for “A Star Is Born”) and moodily scored by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. All the more reason to be grateful it played at Sundance, even if we come to this festival hoping to see narratives on the big screen for the first time, not the last.
