Review: an Obama Biopic,SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU [Video]

Here's the date movie of the year. Southside With You is also about a date, a first date in the Chicago summer of 1989 between the then-unknown Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers) and Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter). Both Sawyers and Sumpter are terrific, world-class charmers who suggest the powerhouses they're playing without undue mimickry.

First-time writer-director Richard Tanne wisely avoids any political agenda to focus on two young lawyers starting out in life. The guarded, whip-smart Michelle is adamant about telling the flirtatious Barack, "This is not a date." 

Sweet, slight and thuddingly sincere, “Southside With You” is a fictional re-creation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date. It’s a curious conceit for a movie less because as dates go this one is pretty low key but because the writer-director Richard Tanne mistakes faithfulness for truthfulness. He’s obviously interested in the Obamas, but he’s so cautious and worshipful that there’s nothing here to discover, only characters to admire. Every so often, you catch a glimpse of two people seeing each other as if for the first time; mostly, though, the movie just sets a course for the White House. “You definitely have a knack for making speeches,” Michelle says. Yes he does (can).

The story opens with Michelle (Tika Sumpter) talking about Barack (Parker Sawyers) to her parents (“Barack o-what-a?” says dad), while he tells his grandmother about Michelle. She’s his adviser at the firm where he’s a summer associate. Barack digs her; Michelle thinks their dating would be inappropriate. Still, he perseveres with gentle confidence, chipping away at her defenses with searching disquisitions, a park-bench lunch and a visit to an art show, where this stealth-seducer recites lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’s short poem “We Real Cool,” an ominous, disconcerting pre-mortem of some young men shooting pool that closes with the words “We die soon.”

Like Michelle and Barack’s journey through Chicago, the poem raises a cluster of ideas — literary, political, philosophical — about Barack, suggesting where he’s at and where he’s going. Mr. Tanne has clearly made a close study of his real-life inspirations, yet his movie is soon hostage to the couple’s history. His characters feel on loan and, despite his actors, eventually make for dull company because too many lines and details serve the great-man-to-be story rather than the romance. At the art show, when Barack explains that the painter Ernie Barnes did the canvases featured in the sitcom “Good Times,” it isn’t just a guy trying to impress a date; it’s a setup for another big moment.

“Southside With You” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for cigarette smoking. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes.

Ms. Sumpter’s enunciation has a near-metonymic precision suggestive of Mrs. Obama’s, while Mr. Sawyers’s gestural looseness, playful smile and lanky saunter will be familiar. Mr. Sawyers has the better, more satisfying role, partly because of who he plays, though also because Barack is more complex and vulnerable. He is the one with the thorny father issues who is trying to win over the girl (the audience, the nation). He’s hard to resist even if, by the time he takes Michelle to a community meeting in a housing project — where the aspirations of the family in “Good Times” meet their real-world counterpart — his words sound like footnotes in a political biography.

Mr. Obama wrote one such book, “The Audacity of Hope,” in which he describes this first date in a scene that’s echoed in the movie. “I asked if I could kiss her,” Mr. Obama writes, before cutting loose his smooth operator: “It tasted of chocolate.” It’s no surprise that Mr. Obama is a better writer than Mr. Tanne and has a stronger sense of drama. But it’s too bad that while Mr. Obama’s story about his date has tension, a moral and politics, Mr. Tanne’s has plaster saints. Abraham Lincoln was long dead when John Ford polished the presidential halo in the 1939 film “Young Mr. Lincoln.” Mr. Obama hasn’t even left office, but the cinematic hagiography has begun.

The scene, are gorgeously romantic. Non-Democrats will probably cry foul and charge propaganda. (If we have to endure a first date movie between Trump and Melania in the name of equal time, so be it.) But Southside With You casts a magic spell by blending budding love with fierce intelligence. Drawing from the outline of a date that is now public record, Tanne imagines the details of Barack and Michelle's conversation with subtlety and feeling. 

Credit: MANOHLA DARGIS

| IN THEATERS AUGUST 26