Written and Directed by Casimir Nozkowski
Starring: Brian Tyree Henry, Sonequa Martin-Green, and Sunita Mani
Running Time: 1 hour and 25 minutes

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

The humble indie dramedy is an interesting part of the cinematic landscape. On one hand, these movies are what I would critically call “fine” or “harmless,” but on the other they provide the opportunity for up and coming actors to get the experience they need outside of car insurance commercials. I see a lot of these movies, and I mostly sign up for the slate of actors involved. The Outside Story is one of these. It’s a movie with a relatively meh plot, but the prospect of Brian Tyree Henry taking on a leading role was too good to pass up. Henry’s turn as the rapper Paper Boi on the FX series Atlanta is one of my favorite TV performances in recent memory. He’s a dude, like fellow Atlanta compatriot LaKeith Stanfield, I want to see in everything.

Henry stars as Charles, an introverted video editor going through a breakup who locks himself out of his Brooklyn brownstone. The film is a chronicle of the day, as Charles tries and fails to get into his apartment and is forced to meet the people in his building and in his neighborhood that he has been content to hide away from up until now. It’s a great premise to introduce a bevy of indie movie talent. Sunita Mani (GLOW, Save Yourselves!, Progressive commercials) costars as a tenacious parking enforcement officer with whom Charles has constant run-ins. Michael Cyril Creighton (High Maintenance, The Post) plays the annoyed upstairs neighbor trying his damndest to engage in a polyamorous threesome with a Swedish couple and who keeps needing to buzz Charles into the building. Hannah Bos (High Maintenance, Driveways), plays a very pregnant neighbor having a stoop sale that Charles helps advertise by gleefully drawing sidewalk chalk advertisements. Everyone is eccentric, and despite a very fun cast, this movie feels corny as hell.

It’s a damn shame that The Outside Story fails to harness what makes Brian Tyree Henry special. You get flashes of it here and there, but the character he is playing has so little to work with that you can’t really blame him. Casimir Nozkowski is nobly attempting to make a big ball of optimism. A film that inspires us to look around the outside world and talk to our neighbors rather than retreating into our shells. While that’s sweet, it’s also a totally unrealistic look at how communities actually work. Sure there’s nothing wrong with presenting the world as you would like to see it, be the change you wish to see and all that, but the way The Outside Story does this feels hollow and phony. There’s just no edge to this movie. It’s not that every movie has to be cynical, but this one is pillow soft.

To complicate matters, the movie’s ending feels like one of those Hollywood Endings that is incongruous with where we feel like the story is going. It presents Charles as a character who, after undergoing a day where his eyes are opened to the wonderful world around him, finally grows up and enacts meaningful change on his rudderless life. The problem is, Charles never really changes. Sure, he makes some new buddies and discovers a deli down the street makes some delicious diarrhea-inducing hoagies (you can already see the hack scene of him desperately trying to find a bathroom in your mind, can’t you), but at the end of the day it doesn’t feel like he has undergone any metamorphosis. And thus the ending--where Charles and his girlfriend (Star Trek: Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green, who shines in her limited screen time) reconcile–feels forced, especially when you take into account the fact that he acts like a total psycho when she brings some movers over to get her stuff and makes it clear that it’s over. It takes a sweet but slight movie and ends it on a weirdly sour note. There’s no pleasure in slagging a movie with such good intentions and such a great cast, but this one misses the mark on enough fronts to make it a hard pass.