In 'Blindspotting,' simmering tensions with a beat

“Blindspotting” - ★ ★ ★

“Blindspotting,” the directorial debut of Carlos Lopez Estrada, stalks the streets of Oakland with a heightened, spoken-word flow, passionately freestyling on race, police brutality and gentrification through a searing story about two friends: one black, one white.

Though stylistically scattershot and often overstated, the funky rhythm of “Blindspotting” undeniably finds a pulse. That's overwhelmingly thanks to the chemistry between its two talented stars — Daveed Diggs, the “Hamilton” Tony-winner, and his longtime pal Rafael Casal — whose characters' relationship steadily simmers until it boils over in an emotional, theatrical showdown.

Diggs plays Collin, who has just days until his probation is over for a violent incident vaguely referred to as a “fire technicality.” He and Miles (Casal), his more hotheaded lifelong friend, are Bay Area movers who trade poetic verses along their routes while cursing the influx of hipsters.

Collin is the cool, composed one, trying to get his life back on track. Miles, with a grille in his teeth and righteous fury at the changing face of Oakland, is buying a gun to protect his girlfriend and their son. Their paths feel increasingly divergent, even as their devotion to one another remains sincere.

While Collin is stopped at a red light one night, a black man runs in front of the truck, turns down the street and, just after pleading not to be shot, is mercilessly gunned down by a white police officer. Collin is too fearful to come forward, but the incident shakes him. In one of the movie's more vivid digressions, Collin dreams of himself standing trial with the murderous cop as his judge, while choking on bullets. Collin regularly jogs through a cemetery, as if he's trying to outrun the deaths of black men all around him.

Diggs and Casal, a spoken-word artist, wrote the film together, and they once considered doing it entirely in verse. That musicality remains in the film's DNA. On the appeal of his freestyling, Miles says: “They like the bounce of it.” “Blindspotting” bounces, too, skipping scene to scene. But you can feel the movie start to impose too much on itself by the third act, when it was better just riffing.

Still, it's hard to remember a recent movie that so powerfully distilled social issues into a single relationship. “Blindspotting” is a buddy movie, at heart, about friends pulled apart by forces outside their grasp. Collin and Miles badly want to ignore the differences created by their skin color, but it gets harder for them not to acknowledge their divergent experiences, eventually leading to a back-alley reckoning.

Diggs, who played Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in “Hamilton,” is obviously an equally talented film actor, so comfortably sliding from fiery monologues to deadpan comedy. He and Casal together are electric, and I only wish “Blindspotting” didn't so easily distract itself from its central pair.

But there's an upside to the film so eagerly jumping from anguish to slapstick, from social drama to buddy movie. “Blindspotting” is, like the Oakland it so dearly loves, always many things at once.

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Starring: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal

Directed by: Carlos Lopez Estrada

Other: A Lionsgate release. In limited release. Rated R for language, violence, sexual situations and drug use. 95 minutes