Review: Southside with You (2016)

In 1989 Chicago, a young lawyer interning at a trademark law firm for the summer took his supervisor on a date through Chicago’s Southside. They admired African American artwork at the Art Institute of Chicago, attended a community meeting, and saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. That young lawyer was Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers) and his supervisor was his future wife, Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter). Richard Tanne’s Southside With You details the first date of America’s first couple, showing the people they were before becoming the most famous people in the world.

At its best, Southside With You feels like Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. It allows its characters to ramble on about race and life and their place within it without interjecting with plot or conflict. At its worst, it’s a bit of a mythic origin story, showing Barack Obama’s talent for stirring a crowd and crossing racial lines years before he ran for office. As it stands, the film is a diverting romance, well acted by its leads and refreshingly brisk in its pacing and runtime.

The lead actors do their best to avoid imitation and turn their Michelle and Barack into real individuals struggling, with the pressures of being young and black. Parker Sawyers is particularly good as Barack. In an impromptu speech at a community meeting, he replicates the real Obama’s speech patterns, but I'd rougher, looser, and softer than the real thing. Best of all, when he and Sumpter bicker, we come to understand how Barack’s intelligence and charisma make him presumptuous with women, chauvinistic even. It afford human dimensions to the most powerful man in the world.

Southside With You is not a seamless biopic like Lincoln or Selma. It's a little calculated in its foreshadowing and the musical score would be more appropriate in a film about Obama’s politicking than a personal portrait of a young black couple. But the film proves a pleasant diversion at the end of summer before the deep dive into weighty pretension of the Oscar season.

7 out of 10

Southside with You (2016, USA)

Written and directed by Richard Tanne; starring Parker Sawyers, Tika Sumpter, Vanessa Bell Calloway.

This article was originally published on the now-defunct Toronto Film Scene.