In a cinema landscape starved for Black romance, Love, Brooklyn strives to be a balm for the souls of lover girls and boys everywhere. Helmed by Rachel Abigail Holder in her feature directorial debut, the film stars Andre Holland, Nicole Beharie, and DeWanda Wise, and follows the trio as they try to navigate love, career, and loss as their beloved Brooklyn rapidly transforms around them. The film is billed as a romance drama, but don’t expect Love Jones or Brown Sugar level feels. Love, Brooklyn is less a story about romance and more a coming of age story about adults confronting the reality of making tough decisions through unexpected change. When you look at it from that lens, the film makes a lot more sense.
Roger, (played by Holland) is a writer whose indecisiveness wreaks havoc in all facets of his life. Romantically, he ping pongs between his charming and artistic ex-girlfriend Casey (Beharie), and his grieving, no-nonsense lover Nicole (Wise). Professionally, he experiences an intense bout of writer’s block as he attempts to write a piece about the plague of gentrification and the pain of watching Brooklyn be stripped of the magic he has grown to love about it. It’s a passion for the Brooklyn community that Holland personally shares with his character.
While location scouting, Holland says his friends were integral in making the film happen. “I went to the coffee shop [Sincerely, Tommy] I always go to and told my friend, ‘Like hey, I’m doing this movie would you mind if we shoot here because I think your spot is so iconic.’ And she was just like yeah. Just tell me what day you want to come.” Both Holland and Holder take pride in the fact that the filmmaking process was such a community effort. For the most part, the central love story in the film is between its filmmakers and Brooklyn culture.
After reading the script by Paul Zimmerman, Holder saw herself in the characters and had the opportunity to infuse her own culture into the story. “Talking about the specificity of Blackness, I made them [the characters] West Indian,” says Holder. “My parents are from Guyana, South America. I was like yeah let’s add West Indian patois and roti and curry in scenes. So it was nice to make it specific to how people in Brooklyn are. We’re all part of the diaspora.”
Shots of Roger biking down idyllic Brooklyn streets, grassy knolls in Brooklyn parks and cozy coffee shops and bars on Brooklyn corners are abundant, but beyond that the borough’s depiction leaves viewers wanting. The most vibrantly Brooklyn thing about the film is the wardrobe.
“I wanted to convey and introduce the world to the creative and Caribbean influence of Brooklyn,” says the film’s costume designer Missy Mickens. “We can wear high low designer and sneakers with a dress. With the authentic culture of Brooklyn, you’re gonna see a Coogi. You’re gonna see a fitted [cap]. You’ll see designer and exclusive sneakers. You’ll see men’s wear but also see a dress with a back out. We can do it all, so that’s what I wanted to reflect.”
Casey’s clothing is most reflective of this influence. As an owner of an art gallery in Brooklyn, she also feels the squeeze of gentrification as developers harass her with offers to buy the building she inherited from her grandmother. This role is different from what audiences are used to seeing Beharie play. “For me it was a gift to play this role,” says Beharie. “Only your community and your friends would know that you have that color.” It’s refreshing to see her inhabit an aloof character who is unafraid to lean into her weirdness. Beharie’s ability to subtly emote with facial expressions and body language add complexity to an otherwise hollow Casey who at times can be frustrating to pin down and understand.
“When watching the movie, people might have this experience where normally they would think Nicole would play my character and I would play Nicole’s character,” says Wise. “So I’m really excited on a nerdy actor performance level for people to see Beharie in a way they haven’t seen her before. And I hope people walk away from this movie with love and community.”
As a recent widow, Wise’s character Nicole finds herself back on the dating scene with daughter Ally (Cadence Reese) in tow. She wants to stand still in her grief, but knows she has to move forward, even if that means dealing with emotionally non-committal men like Roger. Wise infuses a nurturing maturity and vulnerability in Nicole that scares Roger, and challenges him to confront his unhealthy relationship habits and general indecisiveness.
It’s clear he feels more comfortable with the ambiguity of his relationship with Casey, which reads more as longtime friends than ex-lovers. Together they’re playful and weird, showing the most silly parts of themselves without fear of judgment. But even in their comfort with one another they have a stilted chemistry that is representative of their inability to truly be intimate and vulnerable with one another. It’s unfortunate we don’t have a deeper understanding of their relationship history, or else we’d be more invested in the push and pull of their dynamic. Particularly during a pivotal argument that proves to Roger that his relationship with Casey is like quicksand—fascinating but deadly if he chooses to stand still for too long. He soon realizes that his longing for her, similar to his longing for the Brooklyn he once knew, is what is keeping him stuck in the past.
But it’s not until a sobering moment with Nicole on her stoop that Roger fully understands the urgency for him to get his shit together. In an arguably unmotivated monologue, skillfully delivered by Wise, Nicole expresses a nostalgic ache for the life she was supposed to share with her deceased husband and a painful acceptance of what her life has become—a woman who is dating a man that drunkenly bangs on her door in the middle of the night for sex. It’s one of the film’s better scenes, providing the perfect blend of sentimentality and levity.
Performances by Roy Wood Jr. as Alan and Cassandra Freeman as Lorna bring some welcomed comedy to the film, even if throughout they are regrettably under-utilized. It’s through Alan’s character that we understand one of the main themes of the film, which is that love and life is a decision. Or at least, a sum of multiple daily decisions. “Alan perfectly embodies what the old heads tell us. That marriage and love is a choice,” says Wood Jr. “Love is a verb. My character is married. I already made the choice. The question is, are you happy with that choice? I think my character is there to serve as a metronome for Andre Holland’s character as he makes his choice.” Throughout the film Alan struggles with thoughts of infidelity, but he can never muster the courage to step out on his wife. Ultimately, each character makes a decision that catapults their lives into a completely new direction, proving that growing up, moving on and accepting change can create beautiful and unexpected possibilities to life.