How do you tell the story of Rob Peace? He was an exceptionally smart Black kid living in New Jersey, the product of a hard-working mother and a father who was convicted of murder when he was seven. His intellect and interest in science took him all the way to Yale on a scholarship, but circumstance took him back home and to a period of dealing drugs, a bright star crashing to earth, shot to death at the age of 30.
It’s a horrible, haunting tale, told by his old roommate Jeff Hobbs in the book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, and now adapted to the big screen by Chiwetel Ejiofor, in his sophomore feature as director. Trying to find a way to sensitively bring it to life, to weave a way through a maze of assumptions and cliches, is an unenviable trek. And while Rob Peace, premiering at Sundance, isn’t without missteps, it’s a film made with enough tact and empathy to offset alarm, a robust follow-up to Ejiofor’s debut, the moving Malawi-set drama The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Like that film, it’s earnestly told and full of big emotion, sometimes to a fault, and further legitimises Ejiofor as a dedicated director with a sweeping commercial eye. The film might be for sale at the festival, but it comes with what seems to be a substantive budget and some small roles for big names – Mary J Blige as Peace’s mother, Camila Cabello as his girlfriend, Ejiofor himself as his father – and with an enthused and reactive premiere in the bag, it surely won’t be on the shelf for long.
