Sleight (2016)

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Without parents, any visible family, or a decent system of social care – particularly for poor and black people like them - available, young Bo (Jacob Latimore) has to take care of his sister Tina (Storm Reid) all by himself. So he works as a street magician by day, and sells drugs for the seemingly personable – as far as it goes in this business - drug lord Angelo (Dulé Hill) by night. Bo has secrets, though. For one, he does what amounts to actual magic with the help of a home made electromagnet device he has implanted in his arm, like a low key junior gadgeteer superhero. Secondly, and much worse, he is skimming off Angelo’s drugs in an attempt to scratch together to take Tina and leave Los Angeles for somewhere where they can live the life of normal people. That’s particularly unfortunate since Angelo would really rather pull Bo deeper into the Life, doing his best to involve him in more than just dealing, and so has a rather more careful eye on him.

So, at about the same time as Bo’s life changes for the better when he meets and falls in – reciprocated – love with Holly (Seychelle Gabriel), a young woman who we will later learn to have a high tolerance for pretty shitty secrets in her boyfriend, thanks to the difficulties in her own life, things with Angelo start to unravel. Soon, Tina’s and Holly’s lives are threatened, and Bo’s only way out might be to turn his invention for letting coins float into a weapon.

So yes, and obviously, J.D. Dillard’s Sleight can very easily be read as a low key superhero origin story, just one that concentrates on the kinds of people contemporary big budget superhero films still tend to ignore or short-change. This is a film about black, poor people who feel forced to do some pretty shitty things to survive; indeed, some viewers might find Bo “unsympathetic”. He sure as hell does a lot of morally inexcusable things, but like any good film about someone seeking some form of (in this case non-mystical) transcendence, Sleight needs to show what their protagonist has to transcend. And that he does indeed manage to transcend a situation resonant with the way many people actually have to live in one way or the other rather seems to be the film’s core concern to me, a very classical use of the fantastic as a means as well as a symbol for the wish to change and to escape.

As for me, I can’t say I actually ever found Bo unlikeable or unrelatable, but then, there but for the grace of mere chance go I, or really, everyone, so who am I to judge? It does of course help that Latimore’s performance is as warm as it is conflicted, portraying Bo as a guy who thinks he does the best he can in his situation, and who is in the end willing to risk himself for others, and achieving actual change for others and himself in the end.


Formally, Sleight as an entry into the growing number of US films of the fantastic by black directors is very much a contemporary indie (the sort with a budget, but not riches) movie. It is carefully staged, deliberately paced, with a sometimes carefully hidden sense of poetry next to a much more obvious idea of realism, demonstrating a willingness to work with genre elements in ways that’ll annoy some viewers because it makes so little of a thing of them, but which delight me because their use feels so personal and individual and through this, actually meaningful.