Honeydripper, a film by John Sayles

I’d like to know who the person who wrote this is…

Acting: John Sayles has been fearless in writing about, and directing, black folks for more than three decades, and never succumbs to the white man’s curse of making us saints, savants, or simpletons. His black characters are admirably complex and grounded in a recognizable American reality. Still, even he’s never quite risen to the heights he reaches in Honeydripper, a comic drama set in 1950s Alabama amidst the beginning surge of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not just that the principal cast is black but that the movie’s world and perspective is entirely African-American. Whites—Stacy Keach as a corrupt but essentially benign sheriff, Mary Steenburgen as an aloof southern belle—are basically bystanders; the black folks run Honeydripper. Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Yaya DaCosta, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Keb’ Mo’ and newcomer Gary Clark, Jr. all give fine, nuanced performances. Sayles grounds them in a world so tactile, and allows them to play in it so well, that the Honeydripper Lounge feels like a place that exists before and after the viewer enters the movie. Glover and Dutton, playing old friends, push and pull at each other’s behavior. The gentle, but long-simmering, attractions and arguments between characters have gone on for years, and create a network that’s as close to a fully realized black southern community as I’ve seen. The actor spin and expand that web line by line, gesture by gesture, until it’s something perhaps even greater than Sayles intended—a portrait of black life in flux but also in curious stability.

http://quietbubble.typepad.com/quiet_bubble/2008/02/of-time-and-fes.html