Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sophomore film as a director is a sympathetic true story of a college kid’s attempts to free his father from jail. Here’s our Rob Peace review.
Chiwetel Ejiofor made his feature directorial debut in 2019 with The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. The in-demand actor debuted his second feature at Sundance earlier this year and after appearing at the London edition of the festival, Rob Peace is finally arriving on UK screens.
Rob Peace is based on Jeff Hobb’s biography of his college roommate, the titular Robert DeShaun Peace. A brilliant student, Rob (played here by Jay Will) is closely involved in his father Skeet (Ejiofor)’s legal case. Robert is in prison for a double murder he says he did not commit and eventually, Rob turns to selling marijuana to his fellow students to earn enough money to keep the case alive.
The story itself has all the makings of an effective melodrama. At its heart, this is a heartbreaking, emotional story about a young man trying to reconnect with his father and restore a sense of normalcy in his life. Ejiofor smartly directs the film with just enough flair, but never overdoes the bigger emotional swings. While the film’s score can sometimes feel more suited for a TV movie and Rob’s voiceover is often unnecessary, Ejiofor keeps his camera constantly moving and close to the characters to create a sense of intimacy.
The film’s central conflict is undeniably compelling and coloured with the blatant racism that Rob often faces at Yale. The other students assume he must be dealing drugs and his teachers are not only surprised, but a little threatened by Rob’s intelligence. Rob, meanwhile, is constantly pulled in different directions. Everyone around him expects to conform to the usual narrative around Black masculinity, while his mother (an affecting Mary J. Blidge) and his new girlfriend (Camila Cabello) encourage him to live his own life. Rob simply wants his father out of jail, even though he doesn’t seem completely certain that his father didn’t commit the murders that put him there.
The second half of Rob Peace becomes a little unfocused and runs out of narrative steam towards the end. This is very much a film of two halves, and Ejiofor can’t quite keep the momentum going as Rob moves on from college. The first half of the film is superb, but I found the second half to be unmemorable. Trying to fit in an entire life, however short that life might be, is a tough task, and Rob Peace would have benefited from a tighter focus and timeline.
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Ejiofor is clearly interested in the structural racism that Rob and his father encounter, but with so much ground to cover, the film tends to run through things without letting any of it sit and simmer. Character dynamics feel thin – especially Rob and his girlfriend’s – and despite some stellar work from Jay Will, Rob Peace feels more like an idea than a living, breathing person.
Rob Peace is a story told with enormous amounts of empathy. Ejiofor, who also wrote the script, occasionally falls victim to cliched storytelling and he’s tackling a story with a lot of moving parts, which don’t all come together to form the puzzle he’s probably looking for. But there’s no denying the film’s pure emotional power. The story and message of Rob Peace is a compelling one, and Ejiofor treats it with respect.
Rob Peace is now in UK cinemas.
