Netflix's 'All Day and a Night' delivers raw tale of young man's path to prison

“All Day and a Night” - ★ ★

Joe Robert Cole's “All Day and a Night” is a tough and anguished drama that somberly spirals around the circular tragedies of crime and incarceration.

It's the directorial debut of Cole, who co-wrote “Black Panther.” He delivers an inconsistent and disjointed but tersely earnest and raw tale about a young African American man, Jahkor (Ashton Sanders, of “Moonlight”), who grows up with violence and drug addiction all around, and becomes ensnared by it.

Cole, who also wrote the film, doesn't enter the story from the beginning but loops back to it. Our first picture of 20-year-old Jahkor is as he creeps into an Oakland, California, apartment and, after a few quick words, executes a man and his wife in front of their daughter. It's not an easy way to engender us to Jahkor's plight, but “All Day and a Night” dares you to empathize with him.

From behind bars, Jahkor looks back on the path that led him to that night. “All Day and a Night” is a meditative montage of key incidents from his young life - an introspective journey made more tangible by Jahkor's estranged father (Jeffrey Wright), who has long been imprisoned in the same penitentiary. Jahkor has the feeling, he heavily intones, “of being part of the same story, on repeat.”

“All Day and a Night” struggles to cohere these episodes, and its aim often goes astray. Cole sometimes embraces and sometimes deviates from the cliches of the genre, working in the mold of filmmakers like John Singleton to pursue a gritty, grimly hopeless and explosively violent portrait of inner-city California life.

Sanders' tender, scarred Chiron in the middle chapter “Moonlight” was arguably the heart of Barry Jenkins' film. Here, he again suggests depths in a soulful performance, both callous and sensitive. Wright, as usual, brings an expressive gravity to the film, though he's underused. And Shakira Ja'nai Paye makes a natural presence as Jahkor's pregnant girlfriend.

At turns brutal and compassionate, “All Day and a Night” is admirably ambitious even if it remains too scattered and distant to ever come to life. But there are enough flashes of something more here to make you eager for what Cole, and especially Sanders, do next.

Starring: Ashton Sanders, Jeffrey Wright, Shakira Ja'Nai Paye

Directed by: Joe Robert Cole

Other: A Netflix release. Rated R for violence, language, drug use and some sexual content/nudity. 121 minutes