Widescreen: Lo-fi sci-fi superhero yarn 'Fast Color' comes home
Given the tiniest of theatrical releases just one week before "Avengers: Endgame" snapped up every auditorium in the multiverse, the toast of the 2018 South By Southwest film festival has, in June 2019, finally been made available to the movie-watching public writ large.
"Fast Color," available now for purchase from digital retailers, won praise from festivalgoers 15 months ago for being an intimate, indie take on the superhero genre. Directed by Julia Hart ("Miss Stevens") and written by Hart and husband Jordan Horowitz - you may remember him as the "La La Land" producer who took the mic during that movie's embarrassing Oscar-night mix-up with "Moonlight" - "Fast Color" features no fight scenes, no alien intruders, no quippy dialogue.
It does have some trippy visuals courtesy of the scenes that give the film its name, but "Fast Color" is more concerned with family than spectacle, following three generations of a clan that has harbored secret abilities for many, many generations.
The film opens with grandma Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) reading from a handwritten, illustrated journal, telling us that the world suffers from a devastating drought. Cut to her daughter, Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), on the run in New Mexico with ropes around her wrists and a gun in her bag. Who is she running from? And why is she having seizures? (And why do those seizures seem to cause earthquakes?!)
Ruth finds a hotel for the night and pays the manager $26 for a half-filled jug of water - the faucets in the room have been removed, and nearly every wall we see in a public space bears a sign imploring the reader not to waste water. Ruth uses the jug to clean her bloodied wrists after getting those ropes off, and we glimpse a six-month AA medallion in her bag.
"Fast Color" is full of specific, thoughtful details like this. I particularly enjoyed a scene in which Ruth shares her childhood vinyl collection with her own child (Saniyya Sidney), a mechanical prodigy just beginning to grasp her family's supernatural abilities.
Mbatha-Raw is no stranger to thoughtful genre pieces such as the "San Junipero" episode of "Black Mirror," and she drives "Fast Color's" story of reconciliation and self-discovery, one that recalls 2016's lo-fi, sci-fi, on-the-run flick "Midnight Special." That Jeff Nichols film may have had mercurial Chicago actor Michael Shannon, but it didn't have Mbatha-Raw's winning, sympathetic presence.
It also didn't have Rob Simonsen's haunting score, a clash of deep electronic beats and piercing strings capable of producing goose bumps. "Fast Color" is good at goose bumps, a fresh, moving riff on a genre we all know too well. It's worth a blind buy now, or a digital or disc rental on July 16.
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