Step sisters
Keeping it real, Our Song looks at teen lives in the hood
In the name of "keeping it real," movies about African-American poverty often show the very worst. The early films of John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers unflinchingly looked at urban violence, ramping up the bloodshed, sex and soundtrack to maximum intensity, with an ethos that equates authenticity with bleakness.
Jim McKay's Our Song takes a more casual approach to its realism. The film follows three teenage girls of color through their ordinary lives and common experiences in New York's Crown Heights neighborhood. They have friends and family in jail and occasionally hark to potential gunshots in the distance, but Our Song never becomes Girlz N the Hood. Our Song proves so true to life, the dialogue and situations so natural and unforced, that it's easy to forget that you're watching a scripted film and not a documentary.
Best friends Lanisha (Kerry Washington), Joycelyn (Anna Simpson) and Maria (Melissa Martinez) all belong to the 60-piece Jackie Robinson Steppers Marching Band. One hot summer finds them rehearsing routines for a Labor Day parade and subsequent trip to Alaska, with recurring scenes of band practice giving a bit of structure to the loosely plotted story.
Our Song eavesdrops on the three girls' idle chatter at sleepovers, stores or pizzerias, as they discuss the merits of "Tiger" as a baby name, learn how to swear in Spanish or commiserate over no-good boyfriends. Occasionally they shoplift clothes or dabble in drugs at parties, but the film remains non-judgmental. Wherever they walk along the streets, they never seem out of sight of the towering housing projects, as if their poverty is inescapable.
When Maria discovers she's pregnant, the film reveals the enormous pressures put on the girls, who have a friend with a baby son. The father of Maria's baby seems resolutely uninterested in helping out, while her mother relies on Maria's after-school income to maintain the household. Our Song accuses the educational system of failing girls like Maria, who reveals she's had no sex education in school or at home during her prenatal checkup. In addition, the girls' school is closing due to the presence of asbestos, which requires the girls to deal with school reassignment.
Joy expresses her faith in education, wanting to get a diploma even though she has ambitions of being a singer (and interviews herself as a famous poet while alone in a room). Perhaps being true to her name, Joy is the most upbeat of the trio, having a job in a better boutique than most of her friends. She also begins hanging with new friends and adopting their "stuck-up" ways, like the drinking of mochaccino.
Our Song offers a close-up portrait of teenage sadness more than "angst," with Lanisha the most promising student yet the most melancholy of the three, having dealt with her own pregnancy some time before. A mournful tone takes over when one of the girls' friends commits suicide, and while they hold vigil at a street corner shrine, they can hear both angry rap music and ice cream van music in the background, suggesting the different directions their youth pulls them.
The title refers to the band's newest number, "Ooh Child," best known by the Five Stairsteps' version, though the girls occasionally hear an updated hip-hop version on the radio. The lyrics include such lines as, "Things are gonna get easier, Ooh child, things'll get brighter," and in a couple of scenes, McKay shows the girls listening to the song and identifying with it, the way teenagers invariably find meaning in pop music. Thankfully, the director refrains from setting the song to a manipulative montage of pensive moments.
The band itself finds delight in playing music and makes a superb film subject, with dance moves suggesting that James Brown could be their conductor. McKay doesn't take as much advantage of the musicians as he could, offering plenty of close-ups on young faces intent on their timing and instruments, but relatively few distant shots to encompass the energetic choreography.
Director of Girls Town and R.E.M.'s TourFilm, McKay (formerly of Athens), gets wonderfully relaxed performances from his three leads, all new to film, though Simpson is the only first-time actor. Our Song proves a cogent answer to Hollywood's spate of high school films (much more so than Not Another Teen Movie), treating its subjects not as nubile vehicles for fashion and jokes, but with the sympathy and tenderness they deserve as human beings.??