Statistics on Black social mobility don’t always do justice to what a person’s life looks like up close. That’s where movies come in handy as vehicles for understanding, and in “Rob Peace,” a dramatization of a real-life Yale student whose trajectory defies easy categorization, writer-director Chiwetel Ejiofor (following his impressive 2019 directorial debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”) proves more earnest than skilled in bringing heartfelt complexity to another promising, resourceful child prodigy story.
Seven-year-old Rob (Jelani Dacres) grew up in a depressed section of East Orange, New Jersey. He has a knack for numbers, a knack that his single mother, Jackie (a strong Mary J. Blige), who works three jobs and aspires to be a girl, wants to see him develop in private school and college. But spending time with his generous drug-dealing father, Skeet (Ejiofor), teaches this observant boy the realities of survival in a marginalized community. “If you take care of people, they take care of you,” she tells him.
Mary J. Blige and Jelani Dacres star in the film “Rob Peace.”
(Aaron Ricketts/Republic Pictures)
Both systems of individual advancement—a mother’s hope for escape, a father’s belief that one must rely on oneself to rise—are tested after Skeet is sent to prison for murder, when Peace is still a child proving his academic prowess. Though he works his way through a supportive prep school and is accepted to Yale without paying a fee, Peace (Jay Will takes over the role as a teenager), who immerses himself in molecular biology with dreams of one day curing cancer, continues to fight to free his father, believing him innocent. That sense of duty, coupled with an opportunistic audacity, leads this thoughtful, socially adept student down a path that, while it marks him out as a prodigy with a purpose, ultimately puts his carefully cultivated future at risk.
Adapting a 2014 book about peace by Jeff Hobbs, his Yale roommate, Ejiofor is convinced, and rightly so, that the multitudes in his easy-to-admire protagonist are worthy of a movie. But Peace’s fascinating contradictions can clash awkwardly with the piece about two Americas that Ejiofor also pursues, resulting in a framework in which anyone but Rob Peace — a classmate, a girlfriend (Camila Cabello), a teacher (Mare Winningham), even a father — can seem more like a thematic sounding board than a flesh-and-blood figure. (Sample dialogue: “You deserve your chance at happiness,” or: “You bring people together.”)
Will is magnetic as Peace, his personality and weight often offsetting Ejiofor’s overuse of close-ups (there’s also an inexplicable reliance on orange and red in Ksenia Sereda’s otherwise straightforward photography). Will infuses Peace with a fluid, wary charm, alternating between humor, wisdom, and a breezy confidence that one belongs here. But he also knows when to let on that his balancing act is a burden, bringing subtle pain to a wonderfully tense, defensive moment when he tells a skeptic, “I am the person you think I am.”
The actor is so good at casually upending our notion of a lower-class hero that his performance hints that a miniseries might have been richer in developing the narrative around him, those situations and circumstances that made Peace's approach to fate so thrilling and tragic. The film that bears his name is good enough to convey breadth and can articulate its nuances, but like life itself, brimming with promise, it leaves you wanting more.
'Stealing peace'
Classification: R, for drug content and language
Duration: 1 hour, 59 minutes
Playing: In limited release
