Eyes open in Oakland

Blindspotting is an Oakland product, steeped in the contemporary realities of that beleaguered, storied and diverse California city, and filmed there as well.

It’s also a rough-and-tumble buddy movie; an intriguingly bent suspense film; an offbeat comedy of rowdy manners; a brash paean to the saving graces of rap and hip-hop; a belch in the face of Bay Area gentrification; a hauntingly tangled meditation on friendship, parenting, race and the police, personal and cultural identity, guns, cars, smart talk and guile, etc.

There’s a wonderful richness in all that, to be sure, but I mention the local connections first, because this film’s sense of rootedness in a particular time (ours) and a particular place (Oakland, a town recognizable as “nearby” even if it were much farther away from us, in miles, than it actually is) gives it an immediacy that is both intimate and urgent.

And something akin to that immediacy also flourishes in Blindspotting by way of its having been written by two performers, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, who play the film’s two main characters, both of whom are, among many other things, rappers and street poets in their daily lives. There’s an almost Pirandellian zing to that—a couple of local guys making a movie about a couple of local guys who seem to be living it at the same time that they’re creating it.

Not the least of the film’s many charms, however, is that it’s a ripping good yarn, a freewheeling tale that mixes semipicaresque rambunctiousness with hardcore social conscience. Collin (Diggs), who is black, is a parolee trying to get through the final days of his probation without getting penalized for keeping company with gun-toting friends and drug dealers.

Miles (Casal), who is white, is Collin’s best friend and his partner in a furniture-moving business. But he is also a reckless rascal whose more extreme antics have everything to do with Collin having done time in prison.

Val (Janina Gavankar), Collin’s ex-girlfriend, is the receptionist at the movers’ business office; Collin has hopes of winning her back; Miles holds her in angry contempt, ostensibly because of her authoritative manner. Miles is negligent toward his wife (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and young daughter, the latter of whom gets much playfully avuncular attention from Collin.

Several variable layers of suspense develop via these domestic complications and the emerging tensions in the friendship of Miles and Collin, as well as through Collin’s increasingly fraught efforts to steer clear even the appearance of trouble with the law while he’s on probation. The latter element gets an especially ferocious twist when Collin witnesses the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman (Ethan Embry).

Some major reviewers have complained that Blindspotting is disjointed and uneven. I understand what they’re reacting to, but I view it as one of the film’s special strengths. Diggs, Casal and director Carlos López Estrada have mixed modes and moods in order to create a kind of cinematic idiom with which to challenge the stereotypes, rigid categories and other long-lived “blind spots” of human awareness.