‘Rob Peace’ Review: Chiwetel Ejiofor Finds Nuance in the Story of a Gifted Student Who Sells Drugs to His Classmates
In his follow-up to “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” Chiwetel Ejiofor makes noticeable improvements as a filmmaker through a real-life story that, while often unfocused, features piercing moments of dramatic and political engagement. Based on a biography by Jeff Hobbs, “Rob Peace” follows a gifted young Black student from his childhood all the way through Yale, as he deals with economic downturn and trying to free his wrongfully convicted father. To navigate his financial and legal troubles, Rob uses his intellect for stealthy drug dealing, though his ambitions are far bigger and more community-centric.
Voiceover from Rob (Jay Will) adequately paints his proclivity for math and science when the film begins, flashing back to his childhood in the 1980s. These occasional narrations fill the gaps in Ejiofor’s storytelling, detailing Rob’s interests, goals, and curiosities far more than the character’s actions ever seem to. Such is the trade-off when a writer-director attempts to squeeze an entire life into a digestible two-hour span. Rob may not have the historical significance of a world leader or historical figure, but he’s given the cradle-to-grave Hollywood treatment that often kneecaps such biopics.
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Then again, conferring this sense of grandeur and importance on someone so seemingly ordinary is effectively Ejiofor’s mission statement. Rob may not have earned global renown, but what were the hurdles that stopped him? The director attempts to answer this question in numerous ways, first and foremost by playing Rob’s incarcerated father, who spends much of the movie behind bars but remains the albatross around his son’s neck.
Rob’s ascent to greatness in the fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry is often interrupted by monetary requirements of legal appeals. Given Rob’s own poor background — he was raised by a single mother (Mary J. Blige) who worked three jobs — balancing his expensive schooling with trying to win his father’s freedom constantly steers him away from success. His mother and college girlfriend Naya (Camila Cabello) know this, and urge him to live for himself. However, the moral and narrative requirements of being a Black man raised within harsh American systems yank him away from the life, and the story, he could have had. As soon as “Rob Peace” threatens to become a biopic of a breakthrough scientist, it reverts to the confines of stereotypical Black stories within the mainstream Hollywood imagination — the cinema of poverty, drugs and absent fathers — a whiplash that makes a fine thematic point.
The film intentionally wrestles against this categorization, even though it reflects Rob’s lived reality. Ejiofor almost seems to wish he didn’t have to tell this kind of story. The movie becomes furiously (if glancingly) political and pushes back against these boundaries. The more Rob’s peers try to define him, or lure him into theoretical debates about racism, the more he subverts their expectations — or so they say. His ability to navigate Yale’s various social strata is referenced, but rarely seen, which unfortunately sets the stage for how “Rob Peace” plays out.
For the most part, scenes contain moments in their entirety, rather than building to them or contextualizing them, as though the film were ticking off a biopic checklist. In the process, most supporting characters exist only as an extension of Rob’s plans. They each have plot function, but rarely emotional function, via their own unique personalities or points of view. As much as Rob might speak of using his skills for community — for instance, mapping a biological immune response onto his crumbling neighborhood and kickstarting redevelopment plans — the movie’s blinkered focus on its individual subject, rather than his ties to other people, prevents it from feeling like a communal experience.
The lone exception is his dynamic with his father, a potent role of a man slowly losing hope, which affords Ejiofor a magnificently heart-wrenching thespian flex. Will matches up, and the two actors create powerful dramatic vistas. When emotions are heightened — when the actors are allowed to dictate the mood and rhythm — Ejiofor’s filmmaking is rightfully simple. His unobtrusive medium closeups allow the performers to tell Rob’s story through posture and body language. But during scenes that require more precise tonal control, a sense of space, or even movement, it feels as though the camera is merely left running in anticipation of the next emotional peak.
In that sense, it’s something of a relief that the movie seems to skip from one emotional high to the next. It’s never boring, even though it rarely breathes or fully ruminates on its own social implications. A sense of tangible intellect looms just beneath its surface — not only Rob’s supposed genius, but the movie’s own identity as political cinema. But it never quite unearths this, even though “Rob Peace” establishes Ejiofor as a director with a knack for dramatic storytelling, in a way his previous film could not. In an ultimate irony, it’s the story of a man prevented from reaching his full potential, but it also stops short of reaching its own.
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