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‘Ricky’ Review: Powerful Sundance Drama About a Young Man Just Out of Prison Navigating a World of Booby Traps Establishes Rashad Frett as a Born Filmmaker
Stephan James brilliantly plays the title character in a drama that knows the ways of both injustice and self-sabotage.
I felt a similar set of emotions today when I sat, once again, in the Eccles and watched “ Ricky,” Rashad Frett’s drama about a young man from East Hartford, Conn., named Ricardo Smith (Stephan James), who has just gotten out of prison and is struggling to find his way in a world that seems booby-trapped. Frett, let me say this simply, has got it all: a gift for pace and tension and mood, for violence that can erupt out of nowhere or after a slow boil; a sixth sense for where to place the camera, so that the film is always drawing in your eye with a weaving, bobbing, voyeuristic intimacy; the gift for staging a scene in three dimensions, so that every character quivers with his or her own complex motivation; and the ability to mingle hope and despair and rage and decency in a way that, while staying true to the grit of contemporary life, chimes with what the filmmakers of Old Hollywood did. As Ricky, Stephan James has a pensive baby face (he resembles the young Matt Damon), and he plays every moment beautifully, caught between a kind of street worldliness and a larger-world naïveté.
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