Film

Brian Jackson next to the Logan Circle Heritage Trail sign featuring him and Gil Scott-Heron

In DeVaughn’s view, the rise of systemic right-wing racism makes Scott-Heron and Jackson’s work crucial listening for our time. “They say history repeats itself,” he says. “It’s almost like we’ve entered into a new millennial era of the civil rights movement. You think about what our brothers and sisters go through, and the LGBTQ community, also. Think about how, weekly, you hear these stories of police brutality or racial profiling, or you think about the hate groups that are online supporting violence. It’s kind of like the ’60s all over again, but with a new millennial flair.”

These days, when Jackson performs the song “Winter in America” in concert, audience members often ask whether he and Scott-Heron had some psychic vision of the future. “When we were writing, we were talking about the time period that we were living in,” Jackson says. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought nor wanted these songs to be relevant today.”

“I like to talk about Frederick Douglass’ speech from two centuries ago, ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’” Jackson continues. “I love that speech because it basically says, while you guys are celebrating your independence, we’re still waiting for that party. And you know it’s pretty much as relevant today as it was then: issues with voting, issues with health care, issues with housing, issues with racist supremacist terrorism. All those things are still happening.”

Nearly five decades after the Winter in America album, Jackson no longer expects to see his country change during his lifetime. “Look at Germany, which has faced a lot of their crimes, their most atrocious behavior. They have faced them, they’ve dealt with them, and they’re still dealing with them,” he says. “America, on the other hand, is still in denial. America has not even begun.”

Birds Of A Feather

The Lovebirds

Directed by Michael Showalter

In the 1980s, action-comedies dominated the multiplexes. These movies followed a simple formula: Take two funny actors and put them in a crime plot that isn’t quite strong enough to be compelling without their goofing around. Action-comedies like Midnight Run, Romancing the Stone, and Stakeout succeeded entirely on the surprising chemistry between their two leads, and The Lovebirds, the new action-comedy starring Kumail Nanjiani (Stuber) and Issa Rae (HBO’s Insecure), does exactly the same. It’s an 86-minute lesson in film history, and not a whole lot else.

The two comic stars play Jibran and Leilani, a once-happy couple struggling to keep their relationship afloat. They argue about the things real couples argue about — like being late for a dinner party or whether Mythbusters is reality TV or a docu-series — but with more zingers because director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) seems to have let them improvise half of the script. Nobody talks in complete jokes the way that these two do, but it doesn’t matter because nothing that’s about to happen is the slightest bit realistic, and it’s better if we’re prepared for it right away.

On the way to a dinner party, their car is hijacked and used to commit a murder. Assuming that they will be suspects, they run from the police and decide their only path to proving their innocence is to find the murderer themselves. Where it might be a ludicrous plot contrivance in other films, it’s an understandable beat here: Leilani and Jibran, a black woman and a man of Pakistani descent, know they are innocent, but fear they won’t be believed. They feel their best shot at survival is to dive headfirst into the criminal underworld to clear their names.

Playful and predictable, The Lovebirds is a casually enjoyable film, and, like many other Netflix originals, it feels designed to be watched in between text messages. But it relies too heavily on one-liners from its talented cast, instead of creating any comic setpieces or meaningful character arcs. It loses steam as it goes, getting big laughs early on as the two stars banter liberally, but falling apart completely with a third act that’s overwhelmed by its crime plot. It’s hard to care too much about what happens to these characters when they’re constantly firing off one-liners like they’re on stage at the Improv.

Even worse, it squanders its best opportunities. As Jibran and Leilani make their way through the underbelly of New Orleans, they find themselves confronting various subcultures of white institutional power. One scene finds them accosting a group of frat boys, and the climax is set at a secret ceremony populated by the super-rich, complete with masks and strange sexual rituals. Throughout, the characters comment on how out of place they are in these settings, but they never find any real comedy in the confrontation. Instead, it’s just more one-liners. Eddie Murphy, back in his Beverly Hills Cop days, would have made a meal out of this scenario, but The Lovebirds is content to nibble around the edges. —Noah Gittell