November Criminals (2017)

The November Criminals arrives from 2017, a year of many films and this one, in which a Washington teenager named Addison investigates the murder of a friend the authorities have quietly filed under gang violence. It is adapted from a young adult novel, a fact the movie wears like a damp coat. Rotten Tomatoes records a zero percent approval rating, a figure so pure it approaches sculpture.

The picture does place Black performers in its supporting architecture. Kevin's parents, the Broadus family, register real grief, and Cory Hardrict gives the drug dealer D Cash a weary menace. Nobody announces them, and the film earns the modest credit such casting earns. Later, a witness corrects the record: the shooter was white, not black as reported. This is a small nudge at the assumptions built into a police report, and it is a good one. The film sets the nudge down and walks away. No argument follows. No reckoning. A plot turn, nothing more.

Phoebe is competent, keeps a torch for Addison, and eventually tells him to call the police, which he declines, because the genre demands it. That is the whole of the gender politics on offer. Elsewhere there are flickers of institutional indifference, and an affluent Chevy Chase mansion serving as a drug market, hints of a critique about whose death becomes a case and whose does not. The hints never cohere. The movie has nothing to say and says it at length, at a low volume, with a camcorder. We are left with a work that gestures at social awareness the way a sleeping man gestures at waking. The room stays dark. There is no sermon, no lecture, only a mystery that solves itself out of sheer fatigue.