‘Ricky’: Sundance Review

Dir: Rashad Frett. US. 2024 112mins

The experiences of a 30 year-old man recently released from prison after spending half his life behind bars are messy and moving in Rashad Frett’s solid feature debut. While this expansion of Frett’s 2023 short of the same name may, at times, feel like it’s being cornered into making a political statement, the nuanced central performance from Stephan James largely prevents the message from overwhelming the story.

 Indicative of the fragmented, chaotic nature of a life outside bars

Having premiered in Sundance’s US Dramatic competition, where it won Frett the directing award, Ricky should go on to further festival play. It shares a thematic sensibility with other Sundance films like Sing Sing and Daughters, all finding human stories behind America’s dire prison statistics.

Ricardo, known as Ricky (James), was 15 when he was sent to jail for shooting a cashier in the convenience store he was robbing with his friend, who fled the scene. Released as an adult back into the Caribbean American community of Hartford, Connecticut, and the family home he shares with anxious mother (Simbi Kali) and well-adjusted younger brother James (Maliq Johnson), Ricky finds himself faced with the overwhelming responsibility of rehabilitation. He must attend regular parole meetings, get a job, stay away from drugs, attend therapy sessions for ex-offenders — and that’s before he can figure out who he is, and what he actually wants. 

James plays Ricky as a defiant, proud young man determined to get back on the right path, but always with a hint of that vulnerable, frightened teen behind the eyes. He doesn’t speak much about his time inside – or, indeed, about anything at all – but there’s a sense that it has taught him habits which are difficult to break. As he tells his no-nonsense parole officer Joanne (a formidable Sheryl Lee Ralph), Ricky is determined not to go back to prison, but events, and a society unwilling to give him a break, may have another say.

The litany of misfortunes Ricky faces seems or the most part, designed to showcase just how impossible it can be for ex-offenders to stay on the straight and narrow. Background checks mean he is fired from even menial jobs. A lack of transport — he has, of course, never learned to drive and can’t afford a car — means it’s tough to make his meetings on time. Having been told exactly what to do, and exactly when, for half his life, he finds it impossible to maintain his own schedule. And there always seems to be someone trying to pull him back into a life he is desperate to escape. 

The film makes more of an impact when Frett and co-writer Lin Que Young get closer to Ricky’s personal experience, rather than when they use him as a cipher for a wider problem. After spending his formative years in jail, he is at odds with the world; social media, video calls are alien to him. He suffers PTSD nightmares. In his dalliances with women — an ill-advised sexual liaison with troubled ex-offender Cheryl (Andrene Ward-Hammond), a burgeoning romance with single mother Jaz (Imani Lewis) — he is obviously out of his depth. He is both surprised and suspicious when shown even a small amount of kindness. Ricky lives in a limbo of arrested emotional development, which makes his seeming inability to make the right choices easy to understand.

Cinematographer Sam Motamedi underscores Ricky’s fish-out-of-water otherness with shaky, hand-held camerawork, and intense framing. And if some of the film’s many subplots remain under-explored — such as Joanne’s own personal history or a growing friendship with gruff ex-military neighbour Leslie (Titus Welliver) — that’s perhaps indicative of the fragmented, chaotic nature of a life outside bars, in which men like Ricky struggle to catch hold of just one tangible thing that will secure their future.