‘Rob Peace’: Sundance Review

Dir: Chiwetel Ejiofor. US. 2024. 119mins

Writer-director Chiwetel Ejiofor’s second feature tells the true story of a brilliant young man torn between his incarcerated father and the potentially bright future which stretches out in front of him. Rob Peace is buoyed by Jay Will’s touching lead performance as the titular aspiring scientist, but the film struggles to bring coherence to this cautionary tale, ambitiously tackling several themes and tones but never quite bringing them together into an engrossing whole.

What is becoming clear about Ejiofor as a director is that he is very good with actors but less confident as a storyteller

Rob Peace screens as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres section, the same platform where The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, Ejiofor’s directorial debut, premiered in 2019. The Oscar-winning actor plays the troubled father, lending the picture some commercial muscle, but this would appear to be a modest theatrical prospect.

Born in 1980 and living in New Jersey with his working-class mother Jackie (Mary J Blige), Rob Peace (Will) is often visited by his loving but criminal father Skeet (Ejiofor). Father and son have a warm rapport, even though Skeet sells drugs and carries a gun in his glove compartment, a grim indication of the criminal lifestyle he wants his boy to avoid. When Skeet is sent to prison for two murders he insists he did not commit, Peace vows to find a way to exonerate him, but at the same time his academic excellence earns him admission to Yale, which will take him far from home.

Based on the nonfiction book by Peace’s friend and former roommate Jeff Hobbs, the film examines the effects that poverty, crime and racism had on a talented individual who wants to make a difference in his community. But Peace is haunted by a question: what if his father really did kill those two people? Will lets that imponderable hang heavily over his performance as the character continues fighting for Skeet’s freedom — and yet, as Peace makes friends at Yale, he notably does not tell any of them about his father’s situation. Rob Peace proposes that his decision is partly based on feeling shame about his background amidst his rich, predominantly white classmates — but it may also be because, deep down, Peace worries that his father might actually be guilty.

Ejiofor’s screenplay is most engaging when it wrestles with economic and racial inequality, illustrating how Peace has a foot in two very different worlds, unsure where he belongs. His passion for science — specifically, molecular biophysics and biochemistry — has him on a course to receive his PhD, but he nonetheless faces discrimination on the campus of this prestigious Ivy League university. (Because he’s Black, a few of the white students in the lab immediately question him about what he is doing there.) Peace is such a likeable, sweet person, quickly getting into a serious relationship with the sensitive Naya (Camila Cabello), but he never can shake the sense that he does not fit in this elite world, his guilt over his jailed father a permanent reminder of his family’s situation.

Later plot twists will compel Peace to move more quickly to free Skeet, and although his surprising choices are based on actual events, in Rob Peace they feel like they come from an entirely different (and very cliched) film. Ejiofor examines the bitter irony of the fact that, after long resisting the life of crime that seduced his dear father, Peace will eventually dabble in some illegal doings as well, justifying his actions by telling himself it will help Skeet. There is a fascinating suggestion that he can never fully escape his roots — that there is some part of him that, despite all his academic brilliance, still considers himself no better than his criminal dad — but as Rob Peace evolves into more of a crime drama, the story becomes increasingly less believable. 

Will and Ejiofor have strong chemistry, although Ejiofor occasionally indulges in melodramatic theatrics once Skeet is sent off to prison. Blige plays the supportive mother with quiet strength, despite being sidelined by a script that loses interest in her character. Those who know the real events will not be shocked by Rob Peace’s sombre finale, but what is becoming clear about Ejiofor as a director is that he is very good with actors but less confident as a storyteller. Once Peace’s life grows darker in the picture’s later reels, Ejiofor fails to make those hardships resonate, resorting to manipulative techniques in order to elicit certain audience responses. In trying to dramatise the complexities of Rob Peace’s life, Rob Peace ends up feeling merely muddled.