New Black Indie Film Confronts Bi-Racial Dating!

Courtesy of the New York Times:

“Everything about being indie is tied to not being black,” says Micah (Wyatt Cenac), half of the accidental kind-of couple whose one-day romance is chronicled in “Medicine for Melancholy” (opening in Manhattan this Friday). He is making an observation — and also registering a complaint — about the quasi-bohemian way of life he shares with Jo’ (Tracey Heggins), his temporary other half. It bothers Micah that their embrace of the folkways of urban hipsterism seems to require the suppression of their African-American identity.

But his words, which Jo’ doesn’t quite agree with, also suggest a degree of self-awareness, and self-questioning, on the part of Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed this small, incisive film. Most recent movies about culturally savvy, affectless 20-somethings hooking up and being cool are very much tied to not being black. They are about diffident, underemployed white boys and the women who (sometimes inexplicably) go to bed with them.

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to say that Mr. Jenkins, a 29-year-old director whose immersion in movie history is both ardent and understated, is making a black version of a Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski film, or even, to stretch the comparisons a bit further back, a mash-up of “Before Sunrise” and “She’s Gotta Have It.” But it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, either, because the tricky questions that govern Medicine for Melancholy are how, why and to what extent race should matter in relationships between black men and women.