| Frank (Darrell Britt-Gibson) is a struggling actor in LA. He complains about only being considered for stereotypical black roles like drug dealers, and sees a room full of actors who all look like him when he walks out. He’s a smooth talker and can make friends, and enemies, with women pretty quickly. His agent (D’Arcy Carden) attempts to get him to schmooze with industry bigwigs at parties, but his natural affinity for talking does not lend itself for Hollywood networking. | | 2024
Directed by: Nate Edwards
Screenplay by: Darrell Britt-Gibson
Starring: Darrell Britt-Gibson, Arsema Thomas
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Mali (Arsema Thomas) is a confident and successful basketball agent, she also has cancer. She has parents phoning her every day desperate for updates, she has a junior agent (Taissa Farmiga) who does not share Mali’s confidence, and she has a boss who is not ready to replace her. Mali is shown to be incredibly smart – she details how she worked out the best deal in the best city for her client, and how she dreamed to be an astrophysicist when she was younger. She also prefers people who don’t know she’s sick. Mali is way too confident and independent to fall for Frank’s smooth flirtations, but she also really likes that he doesn’t know she has cancer.
Darrell Britt-Gibson has been working for years, and even though it was not the first time I saw him, the first time he made me sit up and take notice was the Fear Street trilogy from 2021, where he played a fairly stereotypical black character but was able to flip that on its edge. And now with She Taught Love, he has turned to writing as well. You know the phrase that goes something like “if you don’t see what you want, create it?” I feel like that’s what’s happening here. Britt-Gibson has created two fully-realized and complex characters and placed them in a genre you don’t always see them in. And with that is able to explore how black people are seen or not seen in today’s culture – a theme which permeates this movie.
The dialogue is really sharp, especially at the beginning, and I love how fresh the characters are – they are just so fully-formed and three-dimensional that they feel very new and original. The problem comes with the genre these characters are in. This is a romantic drama where the young woman is dying of cancer. It’s a movie we have all seen too many times, and even though these characters are unique, and Britt-Gibson’s perspective is original, there is not enough else to elevate this. It unfortunately becomes boring and forgettable.
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