As the credits roll in the opening frames of The Boys of Baraka, we see a group of boys barely into their teens playing their favorite street-game. No balls, no hoops, no Nikes: these gangly, frisky lads alternate playing cops and crooks. The game is realistic enough that a slightly older boy is wrestling a younger kid down to the ground and "reading" him his Miranda rights. As Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's poignant journey through the bowels of what you hope to God is the worst public school system in urban America introduces its cast of players — four boys, students at Baltimore's Dunbar Middle School: Devon, Romesh, Richard and Montrey — the filmmakers give us a quick montage of a typical Dunbar day, a chaotic lunchroom food-fight dissolving into what looks like boys forming a prison chain-gang — students being prepped to be inmates.
In Act One, an unruly student-assembly is addressed by a youngish African American woman. Mavis Jackson turns out to be the local recruiter for an innovative boarding-school program that aims to give 20 inner-city boys the chance to spend the seventh and eighth grade in rural Kenya. "Everybody asks me: Is this a school for bad children, is this a boot camp, or is this a jail?"
Of the four boys chosen from Dunbar, only pint-size Devon appears to have a calling. Devon's grandmother says his desire to be a preacher is the only thing that has slaked the anger he felt when his mom and her boyfriend succumbed to hard drug habits. Richard, 13, thinks a trip to East Africa may be all that will keep the street from devouring him and his younger brother, Romesh. The fourth boy, Montrey, has a filthy motor-mouth that he confesses almost proudly has earned him eight school suspensions and will, as events prove, get him into a heap of trouble in Kenya, too.
At first, none of the Baltimore boys feels any kinship to the arid East African outback that houses their new school. Stripped of friends, family, cell phones, music and favorite brands of junk food — human beings can become homesick even for a literal hell on earth — the boys rebel. Romesh actually packs his bag and starts to walk back home until his brother jokingly warns him that the Kenyan boys will surely rob him of everything, including his sneakers, if he wanders off from the school. The Baraka's mixed-race staff of teachers finds their patience pushed to the brink.
Finally, having gone cold turkey from every addictive vice of American culture, and having acclimated themselves to a rural environment with bizarre animal-life, unpredictable weather — "I didn't know it rained in Africa" — and where 24/7 electricity is an unheard-of luxury, the Boys of Baraka miraculously start applying themselves. Nine months later, a two-month summer vacation back in Baltimore turns into a real bummer as the boys see how far they've grown from the call of the street.
Sucker punch
In a better world, The Boys of Baraka would be a celebration of children given a last-gasp-saloon chance at adulthood, but the film contains an emotional sucker-punch that vamps up the stakes for each of the quartet. In its all-too-brief running time, The Boys of Baraka demonstrates the role bad schools, old-time religion, chaotic neighborhoods and a scarcity of mentoring adults play in pushing kids away from realizing their inborn talents. At the end, a rousing sermon from a boy who can barely see over the pulpit to a congregation filled with his grandmother's friends, and a proud young man's acing a state math test give a tiny grain of solace that the hopes we invested in these four lives were not cruelly mocked.
Directors Ewing and Grady employ a fluid camera that seems to miss not a nuance of this Dickensian world, but their real achievement is to have gained the confidence of the boys, who are heartbreakingly honest in confiding their hopes and fears. An especially moving moment has a young boy sitting in jail next to his birth-father, who is serving a sentence longer than his son's elapsed time on the planet.
The film is a fulfillment of the Kerner Commission's prescient warning that an America divided into two unequal nations, black and white, would come to mock all of Jefferson's hopes for the new, American-coined credo concerning the pursuit of happiness. In the end, The Boys of Baraka should force even a hardened Bush supporter to see what phrases like "the bigotry of low expectations" and "no child left behind" translate into when subjected to the feckless lottery of the political marketplace. Opens Friday.