Michael Martin (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets)
By blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, Turner and Bill Ross’ Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets questions the very nature of documentary filmmaking: isn’t everything staged, when you point a camera at it? Michael Martin, arguably the film’s lead participant, embodies that ontological thesis. He plays Mike, a less successful version of himself who shaves in the bathroom of the movie’s bar and sleeps on its couch in lieu of any other place to stay. But in the real world, Martin is a professional actor: a fixture of the local theater scene who really does work part-time cleaning bars.
That complicates his performance: some elements can clearly be ruled out as pure fiction, but it’s still difficult to tell where the movie Mike stops and the real Martin starts. There are what feel like genuine moments of connection in the film — such as when Mike lays his own life out as a cautionary tale against wasting one’s youth in an extraordinarily heartfelt moment with a younger patron — while the barroom philosophies he holds forth on really do feel like Martin’s own hard-learned beliefs about life.
His performance is remarkable both for the way it contributes to the film’s realist effect — you can watch Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets without ever suspecting it’s not a straightforward documentary — and for the fact that Martin was virtually undirected. Most of his lines, if not all, were ad-libbed; they are genuine reactions to what the rest of the ensemble, who play straighter versions of themselves, were doing.
Because there’s a definite distance between himself and his character, the improvisational demands of his role qualify his performance as somewhat Stanislavskian, with Martin drawing on his own life to create his character. The result is a performance that feels generous and courageous in its honesty, and which hopefully won’t go unnoticed by casting directors. Martin is too talented to share Mike’s fate.
Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn (Lovers Rock)
Against the predetermined real-life focuses of Small Axe siblings Mangrove and Red, White, and Blue, Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock feels more like an impressionistic tapestry. Not based on any particular event, the movie spends its energy conjuring up the free-flowing atmosphere of a 1980s blues party — ticketed gatherings that were set up by and for London’s West Indian communities in response to the racist door policies of the city’s nightclubs — and the encroaching political climate of the time.
But the movie’s dizzying whirl does spin around one fixed point: Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn as Martha. For a screen debut, it’s an intimidating responsibility, but newbie St. Aubyn’s leading performance is perfectly keyed to the film’s vibe, and she easily radiates the charisma and unselfconsciousness that are crucial to setting its carefree tone. From the moment Martha shimmies down a drainpipe to attend a blues party to the blissful exhaustion of the film’s closing frames, St. Aubyn’s fluid performance evokes many of the feelings we’ve largely been deprived of this year: the giddiness that prefaces a night out, shared musical rapture, the revelation of physical touch and the euphoria that follows a chance encounter that has the potential to survive the night.
She also gives viewers an immersive picture of the experiences of a young Black woman in London at the time, feelings that range from the comfort found in the community to the dread of racism and sexual assault and the solidarity both threats inspire. It’s a performance that conjures up so much, and its immediacy reminds us of how much has and hasn’t changed over the interceding years. It would have been remarkable in any year, but St. Aubyn’s deft conducting of the orchestra piece that is Lovers Rock is one we’re especially thankful for in 2020.
Jake Horowitz (The Vast of Night)
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that compels you to fall in love with it from the very first scene. This year, the stylish, electric sci-fi tale The Vast of Night is that film. After a single four-minute shot glides over our small-town 1950s setting, connecting Sierra McCormick’s Fay to Jake Horowitz’s Everett, the film’s two leads continue to hold our rapt attention with a fast-paced, crackerjack walk-and-talk scene.
McCormick is excellent as an intrepid switchboard operator and could’ve easily nabbed this spot, but it’s Horowitz’s smooth-talking radio DJ who left me asking “who is this guy?” by the end of his introductory scene. As a character who narrates on the town’s behalf over the local airwaves, the actor effortlessly takes on the cadence of the film’s specific time and place, conveying curiosity, endearment, anxiety, and so much more through his voice alone. – Valerie Ettenhofer
What’s next: Agnes
Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby)
Reprising her role in director Emma Seligman’s feature adaptation of her 2017 short, Rachel Sennott plays Danielle, a soon-to-be-grad navigating the chaotic clash of her sex life with her family life at a distant relative’s wake in Shiva Baby. It’s a performance that mirrors Sennott’s brand of stand-up comedy, both being sharply observed portraits of the millennial condition. Here, Seligman has Sennott explore sex-positivity, queerness, and the existential crisis triggered by impending college graduation in the highly inappropriate venue of a post-funeral gathering, mostly attended by the older friends of Danielle’s parents but also by an annoyingly successful ex and her secret sugar daddy.
At seventy-seven minutes long, Shiva Baby is an intense, claustrophobic watch, and Sennott spends much of that tight runtime teetering on the cliff-edge of Danielle’s exposure. Hers is an aneurysm-inducing predicament, but those demands draw out a shrewd performance from Sennott, who channels that anxiety in myriad riotous ways — including ferociously chomping her way through a bagel.
And while Shiva Baby’s set-up is deliberately heightened to produce a horror movie-like effect, Danielle always feels like a real person in Sennott’s hands. As a performer, she gets that Danielle’s unremittingly sarcastic tone and eye-rolling don’t equal a lack of sincerity; her nihilism isn’t apathetic but profoundly anxious. As the film builds to a panicky crescendo, Sennott explodes Danielle’s neuroticism with an emotionally naked outburst that bears witness to a generation’s shared unease about the future. Full of pathos and cringe-inducing comedy, Sennott gives a big-screen performance here that will undoubtedly be the first of many.
What’s next: Tahara
Jahi Di’Allo Winston (Charm City Kings)
In Charm City Kings, Angel Manuel Soto’s rip-roaring portrait of Baltimore’s dirt-bike culture, Jahi Di’Allo Winston gives a performance so full of energy that the bikes could run off his fumes alone. As Mouse, a teenager enamored with the daredevil spectacle of the riders, he is the pounding engine of the film, fizzing with endless adrenaline and hurtling towards the crossroads his character must decide between.
Mouse is stretched towards disparate poles: the magnets of glory and money, and the quieter, steadier impulses that drive his interest in animals and affection for the neighborhood’s level-headed new girl. Ambition, grief, loyalty to self, and the urge to conform to a kind of fast and furious masculinity go to war in Winston’s performance, but in the hands of this young actor, these competing influences are melded into one natural-feeling composite.
Winston gives the role a lived-in feel, a quality that speaks to precocious emotional intuitiveness. Such an assertive, accomplished lead performance at such a young age — now seventeen, he was around fifteen years old at the time of filming — will surely open many future doors for this young actor.
What’s next: The Violent Heart
Related Topics: 2020 Rewind
