The writer and director Richard Tanne’s first feature, “Southside with You,” which will be released next Friday, is an opening act of superb audacity, a self-imposed challenge so mighty that it might seem, on paper, to be a stunt. It’s a drama about Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson’s first date, in Chicago, in the summer of 1989. It stars Parker Sawyers as the twenty-eight-year-old Barack, a Harvard Law student and summer associate at a Chicago law firm, and Tika Sumpter (who also co-produced the film) as the twenty-five-year-old Michelle, a Harvard Law graduate and a second-year associate at the same firm. The results don’t resemble a stunt; far from it. “Southside with You,” running a brisk hour and twenty minutes, is a fully realized, intricately imagined, warmhearted, sharp-witted, and perceptive drama, one that sticks close to its protagonists while resonating quietly but grandly with the sweep of a historical epic.
Tanne tells the story of the First Couple’s first date with a tightly constrained time frame—one day’s and evening’s worth of action—that begins with the protagonists preparing for their rendezvous and ends with them back at their homes. In between, Tanne pulls off a near-miracle, conveying these historic figures’ depth and complexity of character without making them grandiose. The dialogue is freewheeling and intimate, ranging through subjects far from the matters at hand, suggesting enormous intellect and enormous promise without seeming cut-and-pasted from speeches or memoirs. The film exudes Tanne’s own sense of calm excitement, nearly a documentarian’s serendipitous thrill at being present to catch on-camera a secret miracle of mighty historical import.
Movies about public figures—ones whose appearance, diction, and gestures are deeply ingrained in the minds of most likely viewers—must confront the Scylla of impersonation and the Charybdis of unfaithfulness. Tanne’s extraordinary actors thread that strait nimbly, delivering performances that exist on their own but feel true to the characters, that spin with dialectical delight and embody the ardors, ambitions, and uncertainties that even the most able and aware young adults must face.
The movie’s first dramatic uncertainty is whether Michelle and Barack’s meeting is even a date. Talking to her parents before his arrival, she denies that it is; talking with him on the street soon after he picks her up in his beat-up car, she not only denies that it is but also demands that it not be one. Michelle explains that, as a black woman with mainly white male co-workers, the perception arising from her dating a black summer associate—especially one whose nominal adviser she is—would be perceived negatively by higher-ups at the firm. But Barack, smooth-talking, brashly funny, and calmly determined, makes no bones about his intentions, even as he apparently defers to her insistence.
The easygoing yet rapid-fire dialogue—and the actors’ controlled yet passionate delivery of it, as they get to know each other, size each other up, and make each other aware of their motives and doubts—evokes the pregnant power of the occasion. Yet the couple’s depth of character emerges all the more vividly through Tanne’s alert directorial impressionism, a sensitivity to the actors’ probing glances that provides a sort of visual matrix for the actors’ inner life. It comes through in small but memorable touches, as when young Barack, smoking a cigarette in his rattling car, sprays some air freshener before pulling up to Michelle’s house. When she gets in, she sniffs the chemical blend; as the car pulls away, she glances down at a hole in the floor of the car, through which she sees the asphalt below. That flickering subjectivity suffuses and sustains the action, lends images to the characters, states of mind and moods to their ideas.
Tanne achieves something that few other directors—whether of independent or Hollywood or art-house films—ever do: he creates characters with an ample sense of memory, who fully inhabit their life prior to their time onscreen, and who have a wide range of cultural references and surging ideas that leap spontaneously into their conversation. A scene in which Michelle and Barack visit an exhibit of Afrocentric art—he discusses the importance of the painter Ernie Barnes to the sitcom “Good Times,” and together they recall Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool”—has an effortless grace that reflects an unusual cinematic depth of lived experience.
The centerpiece of the film is a splendid bit of romantic and principled performance art on the part of Barack. He plans the non-date date around a community meeting in a mainly black neighborhood that Michelle—who did pro-bono work at Harvard and who admits to frustration with her trademark-law work at the firm—is eager to attend. There, Barack, who had been active with the organization before heading to Harvard, is received like a prodigal son. The subject of the meeting is the legislature’s refusal to build a much-needed community center; frustration among the attendees mounts, until Barack addresses them and offers some brilliant practical suggestions to overcome the opposition. At the meeting, he displays, above all, his gifts for public speaking and, even more, for empathy. He reveals, to the community group but also to Michelle, a preternatural genius at grasping interests and motives, at seeking common cause, and at recognizing—and acting upon—the human factor. There, Barack also displays a personal philosophy of practical politics that’s tied to his larger reflections on American history and political theory. The intellectual passion that Tanne builds into the scene, and that Sawyers delivers with nuanced fervor, is all the more striking and exquisite for its subtle positioning as a device of romantic seduction.
Michelle’s sense of principled responsibility and groundedness, her worldly maturity and practical insight, is matched by Barack’s ardent but callow, mighty but still-unfocussed energies. The movie’s ring of authenticity carried me through from start to finish without inviting my speculations as to the historical veracity of the events. Curiosity eventually kicked in, though; most accounts of the first date suggest that its general contours involved Michelle’s reluctance to date a colleague who was also a subordinate, the visit to the Art Institute, a walk, a drink, and a viewing of the recently released film “Do the Right Thing.” The community meeting is usually described as occurring at another occasion, yet it fits into the first date with a verisimilitude as well as an emotional impact that justify the dramatization.
As for their viewing of Spike Lee’s movie, the scene that Tanne derives from it is a minor masterwork of ironic psychology and mother wit. It’s too good to spoil; suffice it to say that the scene is set against the backdrop of controversy that greeted Lee’s film at the time of its release, with some critics—white critics—fearing that the climactic act of violence (meaning not the police killing of Radio Raheem but Mookie’s throwing a garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria and leading his neighbors to ransack the venue) would incite riots.
“Southside with You” is the sort of movie that, say, Richard Linklater’s three “Before” movies aren’t—an intimate story that has a reach far greater than its scale, that has stakes and substance extending beyond the couple’s immediate fortunes. There’s a noble historical precedent for Tanne’s film. If the modern cinema was inspired by Roberto Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy,” from 1954—which taught a handful of ambitious young French critics that all they needed to make a movie was two actors and a car, that they could make a low-budget and small-scale production that would be rich in cinematic ideas and romantic passion alike—then “Southside with You” is an exemplary work of cinematic modernity. Rossellini, a cinematic philosopher, ranges far through history and politics to ground a couple’s intimate disasters in the deep currents of modern life.
Tanne does this, too, and goes one step further; his inspiration is reminiscent of the advice that the nineteen-year-old critic Jean-Luc Godard gave to his cinematic elders, “unhappy filmmakers of France who lack scenarios.” Godard advised them to make films about “the tax system,” about the writer and Nazi collaborator Philippe Henriot, about the Resistance activist Danielle Casanova. Tanne picks a great subject of contemporary history and politics—indeed, one of the very greatest—and approaches it without the pomp and bombast of ostensibly important, message-mongering Oscarizables. He realizes Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson onscreen with the same meticulous, thoughtful, inventive imagination that other directors might bring to figures of legend, people they know, or their own lives. “Southside with You” is a virtuosic realization of history on the wing, of the lives of others incarnated as firsthand experience. To tell this story is a nearly impossible challenge, and Tanne meets it at its high level.
