Blindspotting

Every once in a while, I'll watch a movie that just flat out floors me. Blindspotting is that type of movie. 

This is basically an Oakland-set bromance between lifelong friends, Collin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal). Collin and Miles are black and white respectively, something that doesn't effect their relationship with eachother, except that it totally does. Collin struggles with the way people automatically decide to view a big black guy in Oakland, especially now that he has a rap sheet. He's serving out the final days of a year-long probation for assault, but that's really just one moment from his life, and he feels the pressure of being judged for it. 

Meanwhile, the white Miles feels a constant need to prove he is not some street poser, because of the way he looks (like an outsider, not the old Oakland guard). This is ""blindspotting,"" a kind of bias that the film literally defines for us. When something can be interpreted in two ways, but you can only see one of the interpretations, because you have a blindspot.

Miles is a good guy, and a good friend, but he's a loose cannon, something that isn't great for him personally, but certainly isn't great for Collin, since, as a black man, he isn't likely to be given an inch by police, or by society. Somehow, this film insightfully critiques police brutality, gentrification, white priviledge, cultural bias, our broken probation system, institutional racism, the gig ecnonomy, and appropriation, while also being highly entertaining. 

The film is sharply funny while always keeping a sense of impending dread. It's unique in it's approach, because the two leads constantly fall into spitting free-style rap verse, something that is introduced as something fun they do when passing the time or working for a moving company, but ultimately works as a soliloquoy of sorts. This tactic is used beautifully in the climax, in which Collin inexplicably ends up, gun in hand, in the house of a cop he saw shoot an unarmed black man. It is incredibly emotional and potent and perfect (see video below).

Diggs came to prominence for his award-winning work in Hamilton, and he brings all his rapping skills to this role, not to mention a plethora of heart and pathos. He's electric. But really everything about this movie is just a slam dunk, from the song choices to the editing, it's all just right. In most movies, one would expect Miles it be a constant irritant, but the script (cowritten by Diggs and Casal, long-time friends who also produce) makes him entirely three dimensional. I'm not doing the movie justice by writing about it. It needs to be seen.