An appreciation of Adam Leon’s criminally underseen debut feature which I submitted for the IFI’s Pete Walsh Critical Writing Award
There’s a moment about half an hour into Gimme the Loot where Sofia (Tashiana Washington) pauses on the periphery of a pickup basketball game. She’s there on business, but she lingers for a moment at the side of a thin, quiet looking kid with his eyes fixed on the action.
“What up Al?”
He shrugs mutely.
“They letting you play today?” she asks, a hint of a smile on her lips.
He shakes his head resignedly.
She moves on with a roll of the eyes and a final, teasing “Keep your head up kid”.
It’s a great little scene, not just because it’s funny, but because it tells so much about the world of the film with only a few lines of dialogue. We can easily imagine this kid (who’s definitely not a baller) haunting the fringes of the game every day, waiting for his long-awaited chance to show the big boys he’s got what it takes. It’s one of many moments in Adam Leon’s film with an unmistakable ring of truth, a sense of place and character that speaks to a genuinely lived experience.
The luckless Al is an outsider, but so is Sofia. One with a little more clout maybe, a bit more attitude, but still on the edge of things. Sofia has one constant in her life; her graffiti partner Malcolm (Ty Hickson). Malcolm’s an outsider too, not least because he’s teamed up with a girl. He’s a goofy, awkward sort of guy, very much a talker, more comfortable running his mouth about his imagined deeds than actually doing them for real. Malcolm is a low-level drug dealer but we get the sense he doesn’t really have the stomach for it. He’s more at home clambering over the city’s roofs with Sofia, looking for that elusive wall or train car that hasn’t been tagged yet.
Gimme the Loot is not a film of grand gestures in either a cinematic or storytelling sense. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Malcolm and Sofia’s attempt to beg, borrow, or steal the $500 they need to pay off a security guard at the New York Mets’ stadium. Their target is the Home Run Apple, a giant animatronic fruit that rises up from the bowels of the field every time the Mets score a home run, which we’re told is something of a holy grail for the graffiti artists of New York. From the beginning it feels like rather a hopeless quest, but this quixotic mission is just a framework to explore the complexities of Marvin and Sophia’s friendship, and the movie really comes alive when they’re just bantering with each other. They’re a memorable pair – Marvin, the clownish loudmouth, a perennial bullshitter, Sophia, fiery and perpetually exasperated at her partner’s buffoonery.
The pair’s big break comes when Malcolm, having stolen a stash from his former boss Donnie, makes a delivery to Ginnie (Zoë Lescaze), a bored rich girl who spends her days partying and smoking weed in her mother’s vacant apartment. In their first meeting Ginnie senses the opportunity to have a little fun with this street kid. They hangout, smoke, she teases him a little about his lack of worldliness; he cautiously feels his way through this unfamiliar social territory. Ty Hickson is great value in these scenes, his determined attempt to remain cool while he’s simultaneously falling a little for this girl and scoping out her apartment for any valuables is beautifully played. He leaves in a hurry (and without his shoes) after Donnie and one of his goons turn up in search of the stolen weed, but not before he’s spied an enticingly crammed jewellery case and gotten away with a kiss and a phone number.
He goes back to an unimpressed Sofia with a plan and when he receives a text from Ginnie later that night, he returns in what he thinks is triumph, but the atmosphere in the apartment is very different. There’s a drunken, cruel feel in the air, and Ginnie has been joined by a group of friends who mockingly refer to him only as “the drug dealer”. It’s in marked contrast to the hazy, playful vibe of his previous visit, a rude awakening to the realities of the economic and social gulf between him and the object of his affections. The one slightly clumsy moment comes when one of the girls warns the shoeless Malcolm to take off his by now filthy socks as her mother “wouldn’t want you bringing the street in here”. The line underlines the divide inherent in the scene a little too obviously but the rest of it is well played and Malcolm’s genuine hurt and anger at this unexpected reversal is palpable. This painful setback puts into motion the concluding act of the film and it’s also a spur for Malcom to consider his real feelings for Sofia, who, although she struggles to admit it, has been hurt by his sudden abandonment of her for a spoiled penthouse dweller.
As a director, Leon avoids the show-off tendencies that mar a lot of debut features. Apart from a couple of well-executed tracking shots later in the film, there’s little or no cinematic trickery and the editing is leisurely and beholden to the meandering rhythms of the dialogue. He’s a writer first and foremost, and the focus is always on what the characters are saying rather than any visual flourishes. The indoor scenes are almost all shot on handheld camera, the lens pushed up close to the characters, but when we move outdoors our viewpoint often remains at a distance, the lead actors obscured by the passing crowds. It might be a natural consequence of the film’s guerrilla shooting style but as a way of capturing the flavour of the New York streets, ball-courts, and parks that our heroes wander through it’s effective. The audience becomes another face in the crowd, taking in the sights and sounds of a New York summer, eavesdropping on the pair’s conversations as the life of the city goes on around them.
Gimme the Loot is in every way a small movie. At just 81 minutes it’s shockingly short by the overextended standards of modern Hollywood. There are no shootings, no sudden explosions of violence, no surprising plot twists. It’s a film about youth and friendship, and in Malcolm and Sophia director Adam Leon has created two of the most refreshingly real teenage characters in recent American cinema. The movie ends with a gift refused and a sense that something has changed in the pair’s relationship, but as he does throughout the movie, the director never overplays the drama. It’s a sweet, sad moment that leaves you feeling slightly bereft that your time in the company of these two outsiders is over.
Fuzzy Lamentations 