Names of people killed on the streets of Chicago adorn a wall they stride past. Barack is reading Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” before he leaves to pick up Michelle. In the film, they drive a little and walk a little through Chicago’s south side, but they’re also passing through a larger cultural atmosphere. He took her to a movie, but it was no mere date movie it was Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” Their stops also included an African-American art exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and a community meeting in a church (something incorporated here from a later date) where “Brother Barack” flashes his speech-making skills. The Obamas’ first encounters were, to an extent, sweetly old-fashioned. “Just another smooth talking brother,” is Michelle’s judgment, as recited by her mother. Riding in a beat-up yellow Datsun and flicking his cigarette ash out the window, 28-year-old Barack is on his way to pick up Michelle, a 26-year-old colleague from their law firm who insists that they are not on a date. “Southside with You” is, in a way, a portrait of a president-to-be as a young John Cusack. Though the movie settles into a Richard Linklater-like series of conversations and encounters, it begins with the blare of Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” on the car radio and the unmistakable feel of an ’80s movie. Tanne and his excellent actors (Parker Sawyers as Barack, Tika Sumpter as Michelle) compress into a single day something broader and more meaningful than White House trivia. Nuanced and charming, “Southside with You” is a sunny, strolling odyssey through African-American life in 1989, filtered through two future icons as they navigate the world around them and their place in it. Could “Pizza Night with Bill and Hillary” be next?Īnd yet Tanne’s film is no mere first-couple valentine. Contemplating further such forays into presidential romance is indeed frightful. Writer-director Richard Tanne’s feature film debut, “Southside with You,” views the first date between Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson through a heart-shaped prism.
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