The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

The Many Saints of Newark arrives as a prequel to The Sopranos, directed by Alan Taylor and written by David Chase and Lawrence Konner. It is a crime drama set in 1967 Newark, following Dickie Moltisanti and a young Tony Soprano through a violent gang war. The film carries a substantial Black ensemble, with Leslie Odom Jr. as Harold McBrayer, and that casting feels historically grounded. It is not a modern diversity checklist. The Black characters are woven into the period story about Newark's racial tensions, which gives the film a notable representational texture without turning it into a contemporary statement.

Racial consciousness is the film's most active current. The 1967 Newark riots, the police assault on a Black taxi driver, and the Italian-American and Black criminal conflict drive the plot. Harold McBrayer builds a Black criminal family and later relocates to a white neighborhood, and the film frames racial power as an engine of the drama. It does not, however, lecture. The racial material is dramatized, not sermonized, and the film remains a crime drama first. There is no LGBTQ subplot, no feminist agenda, no climate crusade, no anti-capitalist parable, no body positivity message, no neurodivergence arc, and no revisionist history. Female characters such as Livia and Giuseppina exist as period figures, not ideological vehicles. Tony's high IQ is a plot point, not a neurodiversity theme.

The result is a period crime film with social texture, not a modern morality lecture. It uses real history as a backdrop and does not rewrite it to serve a present-day doctrine. Its progressive content lives mostly in its racial dynamics and its ensemble, both embedded in the story instead of bolted on. The vintage is dry, violent, and occasionally muddled, with the weight of a Sopranos story and only a faint aftertaste of a seminar.