Movie Review: MICKEY HARDAWAY

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 9th, 2024 / 09:15 AM

MICKEY HARDAWAY movie poster | ©2024 Indie Rights

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Rashad Hunter, Ashley Parchment, Stephen Cofield Jr., David Chattam, Dennis La White, Gayla Wilson, Samuel Whitehill, Sean Alexander James, Christopher M. Cook
Writer: Marcellus Cox
Director: Marcellus Cox
Distributor: Indie Rights
Release Date: August 9, 2024 (theatrical, Amazon Freevee)

MICKEY HARDAWAY is an artful if uneven portrait of a young Black artist in Los Angeles. Writer/director Marcellus Cox has given his protagonist an unexpected trajectory.

Mickey (Rashad Hunter) is born into a working-class family, but his problems are not with the lure of street life. He couldn’t care less about that. Instead, it’s the fact that his father Randall (David Chattam) is verbally and physically abusive.

Mickey is extremely talented at capturing likenesses and expressions with his artwork (Jay Liebel and Jonte Drew did the actual drawings) and we are told he is a gifted cartoonist as well. But Randall doesn’t see this as a blessing. His own dreams were crushed as a young man. He says he doesn’t indulge Mickey’s dreams because they won’t help earn a living, but it seems more a case of Randall wanting to spread his own misery around. Randall can’t beat Mickey’s ambitions out of him, but he succeeds in modeling alcoholism for his son.

Mickey does get out of the house, and has a few people who are actively rooting for/helping him. But then …

The action is interspersed with Mickey’s sessions with an empathetic psychiatrist, Dr. Cameron Harden (Stephen Cofield Jr.). This allows us to hear Mickey’s perspective on his situation, as well as his views of others.

On the one hand, filmmaker Cox makes an excellent case of “children learn what they live.” He’s on less firm ground when he appears to want us to see how Mickey’s later choices are the result of not only horrendous parenting, but also systemic racism.

On the other hand, we get that Mickey is bullied at school by his peers, and then suffers betrayal, but neither of these seem even slightly related to ethnicity. The specific betrayal in fact is so common in the arts that it’s harder to find someone who hasn’t been through a version of it than someone who has.

Additionally, Mickey has artistic gifts and encouragement that are uncommon. By the time we get to the last act, we can see that Mickey has been made into his own worst enemy. We understand how this has come about, but we don’t feel personally complicit, which seems to have been the intention.

Cox gets excellent performances from his actors. Hunter is passionate and open, Cofield exudes erudition, and Chattam conveys bone-deep rage. Ashley Parchment, as Mickey’s warmly loving girlfriend, and Dennis La White, as an influential high school teacher, also make a mark. The dialogue is sometimes on the nose, but the cast makes it sound natural.

The black-and-white photography by cinematographer Jamil Gooding is crisp and beautiful.

MICKEY HARDAWAY doesn’t always match its events to its ultimate message. However, taken as the story of an individual, it is idiosyncratic, well-acted and well-filmed enough to be worth a look.

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