Call It What You Want.  I Call It Great.

A Thousand and One a film by A.V. Rockwell.  With Teyana Taylor, William Catlett, Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney, Josiah Cross.  Streaming on Prime and other platforms. *****

A Thousand and One is the best movie I’ve seen in years.  It focuses on the black underclass—a group I need to learn about—but isn’t about pimps, whores, drugs, and crime.  It isn’t cool.  It isn’t hip.  It’s about real people trying to make their way in life.  The script is amazing, the direction is flawless (both of these the work of first-time filmmaker A.V. Rockwell), and all the acting is excellent.  It rips your heart out.  It is set in a slowly gentrifying New York City, beginning in the age of Giuliani and extending to the age of Bloomberg, and the city’s gradual improvement is not necessarily good news for the characters.  The story it tells is difficult, but the movie isn’t rubbing our noses in it or trying to make us feel bad.  It just tells the story, of people we don’t know and utterly overlook.  In an age of mindless stupid entertainment, it’s a true work of art.  If there is an award somewhere that recognizes such things, it should win hands down.

Inez de la Paz (Teyana Taylor) is a black woman who is just coming out of prison at Rikers.  We don’t know what she was in for or how long she was there; those things are not important.  In prison and before, Inez did hair for women around her, and she would like to get back to that.  But when she returns to her original community in Brooklyn, she sees the six-year-old child, Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola) whom she abandoned to foster care when she went into prison.  She soon hears he’s in the hospital for something that happened with his foster family (the situation sounds possibly abusive) and goes to visit.  He doesn’t understand why she has to leave him again, though she had come to tell him that’s what she’s doing.  It’s as if his question makes her ask herself the same thing.  On an impulse, she kidnaps him and takes off.

She heads to Harlem, which is like another world; there is a news item on the radio about a foster child who has been snatched, but the people around her have enough on their plates without paying attention to that.  She looks for a room and encounters an older woman who asks about her background, her people.  All that is just a blank.  The woman does rent her a room, and tells of a job doing cleaning in Queens (a long subway ride away) that will make her some money.  Inez still wants to do hair.  But in a way she’s made a choice, devoting her life to Terry instead of doing what she wants.  She apparently takes that job or another one like it.

Terry at age six can’t hang out on the streets.  Perhaps they’re too dangerous or perhaps he’ll be identified as the kidnapped child.  So Inez leaves him every day with a television, a few toys, some pre-prepared meals, and an empty apartment.  We see one of those long empty lonely days, with Terry sometimes staring out the window at what’s going on.  But he apparently acquires some inner resources.  The thing that many poor mothers worry about—that their child will be ruined out on the street—doesn’t happen to Terry.

Before long a man named Lucky (William Catlett) comes into Inez’s life, and she tells Terry he’ll be staying with them.  We eventually realize Lucky had also been in prison, has been in Inez’s life before, is looking for a place to stay, and doesn’t necessarily want to be tied down (he’s out walking with Terry to get some groceries when an attractive young woman runs into him and says, “Call me.”  We’ll remember that).  Terry naturally resents him, and we’re all set for a mano a mano rivalry involving potential abuse (Lucky is a tough-looking guy), but that doesn’t happen.  Lucky is no perfect role model, but he eventually fathers Terry and loves him in his own way.  “We’re two crooks,” Lucky says to Inez at one point.  “How do we know how to have a family?”  But they do.  They have a deep primal wish to give Terry what they didn’t have.  They don’t make a big deal out of it, but they both do it.

Two more actors (Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross) play Terry at age 13 and 17, and the transitions are seamless; he seems to be the same person, just older and bigger.  He’s done well at school and is a kind of prodigy; he’s a candidate for Brooklyn Technical (which Rockwell herself attended) and, eventually, for Harvard and MIT.  It’s the age of affirmative action, and things look bright.  In the meantime, he’s dealing with the things all young men deal with (trying to find a girl, facing Lucky’s long absences and, toward the end, Lucky’s serious illness); it’s a coming of age movie that doesn’t leave anything out.

This is not the glamorous glitzy New York we’ve seen in dozens of movies; these are the run-down, overcrowded, heavily littered streets of a place that is going downhill.  When it looks as if things might get better—white men are buying the buildings and promising to fix things up—it turns out they’re improving the neighborhood but also pushing the underclass out; the arrival of white people in Harlem is not a good thing for Inez.  And toward the end of the movie there’s a plot twist that neither I nor my wife saw coming.  It upsets the whole applecart, not just for Inez, but also, potentially, for Terry.  Inez did something wrong in the past that is about to catch up with her.  But like so many things in this movie, the wrong thing she did was also profoundly right.

I can’t begin to say how emotionally satisfying it was to watch this movie, and to realize that it just came out.  It doesn’t seem to have gotten the notice it should—it was in theaters for a while, and is now on streaming platforms—though the reviews I’ve seen have been great, and it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.  I’d happily watch the movie again, right now.  I don’t expect to see its equal anytime soon.

I have no idea what the title means.  I also don’t care.  Call it what you want.  It’s a great movie.