Charm City Kings

Mouse desperately wants to join The Midnight Clique, the infamous Baltimore dirt bike riders who rule the summertime streets. When Midnight’s leader, Blax, takes 14-year-old Mouse under his wing, Mouse soon finds himself torn between the straight-and-narrow and a road filled with fast money and violence.

Charm City Kings evokes such films as Boyz n’ the Hood, A Bronx Tale, and Torque. I know; one of those things isn’t like the others. The filmmakers, however, put the motorcycle fetish to good use, infusing it with imagery that’s almost religious in order to reveal its real-world impracticality. Mouse (Jahi Di'Allo Winston) is a bright 14-year-old boy with a natural affinity for and encyclopedic knowledge of animals that make him a natural-born veterinarian — if he lives long enough to become one. His late older brother Stro (Tyquan Ford), whom Mouse idolized, has become the patron saint of Mouse's adoration of bikes; whenever he speaks about them, Mouse is overwhelmed with a kind of ecstatic, frantic fervor. Meanwhile, gangbanger Blax (Meek Mill) and detective Rivers (Will Catlett) butt heads over Mouse’s future. It’s worth noting that this conflict is not distilled into a black-and-white morality, and the two men strike an unexpected deal to ensure Mouse gets a second chance. The film has been skillfully staged, photographed and edited (Katelin Arizmendi’s cinematography in particular provides us with a vivid experience of the Baltimore summer streets) — perhaps a little too much so; there’s a high speed chase that ironically seems to glorify exactly the sort of behavior that the movie as a whole condemns. Cutting this sequence would have solved another pressing issue: that of the excessive running time. I’m splitting hairs, though; unlike most movies about motorized criminals (like Fast and Furious, to mention one other than Torque), Charm City Kings knows that actions have consequences; can't live life in the fast lane very long without crashing sooner or later. The film is also aware that cycles must be broken for things to change. Mouse goes down the same path as his brother, never stopping to think that he could end up the same way; on the contrary, he is convinced that for some reason he is different, special — and he is, or rather, he could be, if he really wanted to. I'm always complaining about kids acting like adults in movies for no other reason than that it's 'cute.' Here, though, Winston acts not like an adult but like a child doing his best to appear older than his age to fit in with the group he wants to be a part of. Fittingly, his performance isn't resolute and steady but tentative and uncertain, and that's the perfect note for the character (Blax even warns him that a real man doesn't stutter or look down, failing to realize at the time that Mouse remains, despite his bravado, a kid who has no idea what he's getting himself into). This is a great performance from Winston as a kid who, on streets where children must often grow too fast for their own good, wants to be the first to cross the finish line.