Brother to Brother
''Brother to Brother" is a very good drama about the difficulties of being young, black, and gay. With a bigger budget and a sharper focus, it might have been a great one. You take what you get, though, especially with a subject as rarely dealt with on film as this.
When last we saw Anthony Mackie, he was playing sperm-donor stud to half the lesbians in New York in Spike Lee's outrageous ''She Hate Me," then a bullying boxer in ''Million Dollar Baby."
''Brother" shows him heading in a wholly new direction as Perry, a brooding, lonely young painter attending Columbia University. Perry has been kicked out of his Brooklyn home by homophobic parents; childhood pal Marcus (Larry Gilliard Jr.) appears to be the only African-American not actively freaked out by his friend's gayness.
The same can't be said for the other students in Perry's black studies course, where the mere mention of James Baldwin's homosexuality is enough to set off an angry confrontation.
More than Baldwin, ''Brother," which has been written and directed by Rodney Evans, is fascinated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and with the flowering of black gay voices within that cultural movement. Perry meets a cantankerous old man who turns out to be Richard Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson), the artist whose small output of writing and paintings was perhaps the most explicitly gay of the Renaissance. The older man takes the alienated youth under his wing for a tour of his memories, and these black-and-white dramatic reenactments take up half the film.
Luckily, they're good: earnest, clumsily filmed, but involving. The young Nugent (Duane Boutte) arrives in Harlem as a playful and openly gay cultural bomb-thrower, and he quickly falls in with poet Langston Hughes (Daniel Sunjata) and novelists Zora Neale Hurston (Aunjanue Ellis) and Wallace Thurman (Ray Ford). The latter becomes a lover, friend, and mentor to Bruce, and ''Brother to Brother" is unapologetically up front about their relationship.
We follow this group from early, idealistic high spirits to the publication of their defiant manifesto/journal ''Fire!!" in 1926, through its condemnation by black cultural leaders (the NAACP made sure Harlem newsstands didn't stock the magazine) and the inevitable splintering that followed. This is rich stuff, but too often Evans loses focus, both literally (as in the wall behind an actor being in crisper focus than the actor himself) and in the sense of a novice director stretching to cover as many bases as possible.
The film's time scheme doesn't jibe, either. The real Richard Bruce Nugent died at 81 in 1987, yet ''Brother to Brother" seems to take place today, and actor Robinson looks like what he is: a hale 64-year-old, with hair dyed white. Improbabilities stalk this movie and lay it low at the most inconvenient times, notably in Nugent's final scenes.
It's the sequences of the young hero navigating a hostile modern world that have the sting of the fully felt. In addition to disgusted parents and a classmate (Billoah Greene) threatening to beat him up, Perry dallies with a white student (Alex Burns) who's experimenting with his sexuality and whose attempts to get down, in all senses of the phrase, turn unintentionally racist.
And the larger context -- of whether the African-American struggle can include black homosexuality as part of its rebellion and one of its voices without having a meltdown -- is put across with admirable finesse. It isn't merely nice that Perry can take strength from a survivor like Nugent. As this promising film insists, it's necessary.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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