I’ll admit, from the first scene in director and TV series helmer Rachael Abigail Holder’s first feature, Love, Brooklyn, I was prepared to fully dislike this movie. In it, we see a writer named Roger (André Holland, Moonlight) cycling down the middle of the street somewhere in Brooklyn. There are a couple cars behind him, clearly being held up by his casual peddling, but more importantly, there’s an empty bike lane to his left that he is totally ignoring.
I’m guessing that screenwriter Paul Zimmerman didn’t write that the character was so brazen when it came to traffic laws, but it drove me insane nevertheless. Thankfully, things with the movie get better after that; there are a couple more shots in which Roger does the exact same thing, and I felt that familiar rage build up inside of me once again. Late in the film, he gets the front tire of his bike stolen while it’s chained up outside an apartment he’s visiting, and I was applauding on the inside.
Love, Brooklyn isn’t so much a story as it is a series of events connected by relationships that other people have to Roger. He’s a writer on a deadline that he knows he can’t hit, but that doesn’t stop him from walking away from his laptop every chance he gets to meet up and go drinking with his former girlfriend/current best friend and art gallery owner Casey (Nicole Beharie, The Morning Show), or heading to the apartment of his current girlfriend Nicole (DeWanda Wise, She’s Gotta Have It), who has a young child from her recently deceased husband, whom she’s still not over. Eventually, the women are fully apprised of each other’s existence, but it does complicate things a bit, especially with Nicole, who suspects (correctly) that Roger still has a thing for Casey.
Roger also has a male best friend, Alan (Roy Wood Jr., The Daily Show), who is married but has frequent, out-loud fantasies about sleeping with other women, which he would clearly never do. But he lives vicariously through Roger’s stories about his various dates and meet-ups. The film is meant to be more of a profile of modern dating, and it’s no coincidence that Roger’s writing assignment is about how much Brooklyn has changed in recent years. He notes that even in the short time since he pitched the story to his editor, things have changed even more, but he might be talking more about his own dating life than he is the borough itself.
The best part about Love, Brooklyn is the way each of these three main characters is given a fully realized life, both in and out of Roger’s sphere of influence. Casey is being pressured to sell her gallery to a company developing other properties in the neighborhood. I was especially excited to see Brigette Lundy-Paine from I Saw the TV Glow as Casey’s quirky receptionist, Riley. She attempts to tell Roger about her conundrum, but it’s at a time where he’s trying to commit more to Nicole and her daughter Ally (Cadence Reese), who has started expressing an interest in spending more time with Roger as well. He ends up blowing off Casey when she needs him most and rather than getting angry, she decides to not lean on him or their relationship as much.
As mentioned, Nicole is still reeling from the loss of her husband, and a mishap during an outing between Roger and Ally leads to the adult relationship taking a hit as well. The shifting state of Brooklyn is always the backdrop of all of these encounters, but I was far more interested in the characters in the foreground. Love, Brooklyn occasionally comes dangerously close to being one of those films that thinks that there’s something special about a place as big as Brooklyn, but it’s just the next in a long line of places in danger of being overdeveloped and pushing out the people that made it special in the first place. Anyone reading this been to Austin recently?
Still, the film has lovely, nuanced performances from its leads, who instill wonderfully specific details in each of their characters, and the filmmaker finds a lot of ways to make the neighborhoods look fun to live and play in.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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