In his follow-up to The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Chiwetel Ejiofor makes significant strides as a filmmaker, telling a true story that, while often unfocused, offers piercing moments of dramatic and political engagement. Based on a biography by Jeff Hobbs, Rob Peace follows a bright young black student from his childhood through his studies at Yale as he struggles with the economic crisis and tries to free his wrongfully convicted father. To cope with his financial and legal problems, Rob turns his wits to the clandestine drug trade, though his ambitions are far grander and more community-focused.
Early in the film, Rob (Jay Will) appropriately describes his love of math and science in a voiceover, and looks back on his childhood in the 1980s. These occasional bits of narration fill in the gaps in Ejiofor’s narrative, detailing Rob’s interests, goals and curiosities in far greater detail than the character’s actions ever seem to. That’s the trade-off a screenwriter and director must make when trying to squeeze an entire life into a digestible two-hour period. Rob may not have the historical significance of a world leader or historical figure, but he gets the cradle-to-grave treatment from Hollywood, which often makes such biopics falter.
On the other hand, giving such a sense of grandeur and importance to someone who seems so ordinary is Ejiofor’s guiding principle. Rob may not have achieved worldwide fame, but what obstacles prevented him from doing so? The director tries to answer this question in several ways, most notably by playing Rob’s incarcerated father, who spends much of the film behind bars but nonetheless remains the burden around his son’s neck.
Rob’s rise to greatness in the fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry is often interrupted by financial demands of legal aid. Given Rob’s own poor background – he was raised by a single mother (Mary J. Blige) who worked three jobs – trying to balance his expensive schooling with trying to gain his father’s freedom constantly distracts him from success. His mother and college girlfriend Naya (Camila Cabello) know this and urge him to live for himself. But the moral and narrative demands of a black man raised in harsh American systems tear him away from the life and story he could have had. Just as “Rob Peace” threatens to become a biopic about a groundbreaking scientist, it returns to the confines of stereotypical black stories within the mainstream Hollywood imagination – the cinema of poverty, drugs and absent fathers – a whiplash that makes a good thematic point.
The film consciously resists this categorization, even though it reflects the reality of Rob’s life. Ejiofor almost seems to wish he didn’t have to tell this kind of story. The film becomes (if only superficially) immensely political and pushes against these boundaries. The more Rob’s peers try to define him or engage him in theoretical debates about racism, the more he subverts their expectations – or so they say. His ability to navigate Yale’s various social classes is mentioned but rarely shown, which unfortunately sets the stage for how “Rob Peace” unfolds.
Most scenes contain moments in their entirety rather than building or contextualizing them, as if the film were checking off a biopic checklist, with most minor characters existing only as extensions of Rob’s plans. They all serve a plot function, but rarely an emotional function, because of their own unique personality or point of view. As much as Rob may talk about using his skills for the community—for example, mapping a biological immune response to his crumbling neighborhood and initiating redevelopment plans—the film’s narrow focus on its individual subject rather than its connections to other people prevents it from feeling like a communal experience.
The one exception is his relationship with his father, a strong role of a man slowly losing hope that allows Ejiofor to give a gloriously heartbreaking performance. Will is no match for him, and the two actors create powerful dramatic vistas. When the emotions are heightened—when the actors are allowed to set the mood and rhythm—Ejiofor’s cinematography is rightly simple. His unobtrusive medium close-ups allow the actors to tell Rob’s story through posture and body language. But in scenes that require more precise tone control, a sense of space, or even movement, it feels like the camera just keeps rolling, anticipating the next emotional climax.
In that sense, it’s a relief that the film seems to jump from one emotional high point to the next. It’s never dull, even though it barely breathes or thinks through its own social implications thoroughly. Lurking beneath the surface is a sense of palpable intellect — not just Rob’s supposed genius, but the film’s identity as political cinema. But it never quite brings that to light, even though “Rob Peace” establishes Ejiofor as a director with a talent for dramatic storytelling that his previous film couldn’t. In an ultimate irony, it’s the story of a man prevented from reaching his full potential, but he also falls short of his own.
