Mickey Hardaway, the first feature of Marcellus Cox, who both wrote and directed, feels like the type of film that encapsulates the importance of indie filmmaking. Pointed, character-driven, at times hard to watch, but always thought-provoking, the film is a showcase of the types of stories that can be found when new voices are allowed space.
Because the thing with Mickey Hardaway isn’t that the story is all that new. The thing is that it’s not. At its core, the movie is about generational trauma and how it breeds violence. That shouldn’t be such a universal story, but it is. Yet, Mickey Hardaway is a specific story within the universality of a subject. That’s the only way to tell interesting stories, to find the specificity within a story that might be familiar to a lot of people.
However, Mickey Hardaway does more than that, as it manages to tell a very familiar tale without getting lost in the stereotypes or relying on the cliches. More importantly, the story never pretends to portray anything other than one particular Black man’s experience, because it understands the importance of that specificity to the universal message it’s trying to tell. Violence is violence. Black violence is Black violence. Mickey’s experience, that’s his.
We, the audience, take whatever we have to — or need to, from the movie.
The cast, composed of Rashad Hunter, Ashley Parchment, Stephen Cofield Jr, David Chattam, Dennis LA White, Gayla Johnson, Samuel Whitehill, Sean Alexander James, Charlz Williams does a tremendous job of bringing both vulnerability and strength to a movie that requires a great deal of emotional heavy lifting, but it is Rashad Hunter who has the highest requirement — and who is, therefore, the one who makes the movie work, even when the film drags a bit in the third act.
A character-driven movie cannot work without an actor who can feel comfortable going from one end to the other in the range of emotions, and Hunter succeeds at both the lightness and the dark required of the titular character in a movie that is so heavy that, at times, it feels like the audience could use a break. Except Mickey Hardaway doesn’t get one. Life doesn’t give you one.
For a movie that seems to touch on a lot of important subjects, toxic masculinity, the cycle of violence, discrimination, and how many of these things are, if not a result, at least not helped by a broken system that asks way too much of young people without ever giving them the tools to be the best version of themselves, Mickey Hardaway isn’t actually all that hard to follow. It is, however, a bit slow near the end, and might have benefited from a tighter edit.
Despite that, however, Mickey Hardaway is the kind of movie that’s hard to forget. Some movies disappear from our minds as soon as the credits roll. Others, however, leave a lasting impression. Mickey Hardaway is the second kind. Just, a fair warning… you might need a Kleenex or two to get through it.
Mickey Hardaway is available to stream on Tubi, Apple TV & Prime Video.