Prince of Broadway · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Lucky works a sidewalk. He picks a tourist out of the crowd, falls in step, says the thing that gets a stranger to slow down, and if it goes right the two of them peel off Broadway through a door, up a back stair, past a curtain, into a room stacked to the ceiling with boxes. Sneakers, handbags. None of it is what the label says. Everyone in the room knows that. The sale happens anyway.

Hold onto the geometry of that move, because Sean Baker builds the whole film out of it: an act performed in public that only makes sense because of a room you cannot see from the street.

Deleuze has a name for movies shaped like this, and it isn't the obvious one. He splits action cinema into a large form and a small form. Large form is the one you know: a situation presses on a man until he does something decisive that changes it. The western, the gangster picture. Small form runs backwards. A small, partial action comes first, and what it discloses is a situation you didn't know was there. That is the puller's job description. His gesture is elliptical by trade, a hand near an elbow, a low sentence, a nod toward a doorway, and it points at an entire economy that has to stay off-camera to keep working. Deleuze calls a gesture like that an index of lack: a visible act whose real content is the invisible thing it implies. Baker keeps returning to doorways, back stairs, curtained partitions, stockrooms. Every threshold in the film is a place where something changes value.

So it starts as competent action cinema. Then Linda arrives with an eighteen-month-old, says the boy is his, and leaves.

Here is what breaks. Lucky isn't incompetent. Prince Adu plays him as a man who is very good at his work, watchful, fast, funny in his exasperation, and none of that skill has any purchase on a toddler in an under-furnished apartment. Deleuze's term for this is the crisis of the action-image: the point where a character perceives his situation perfectly well and has no action available that would answer it. It is the hinge of his whole two-volume argument about cinema, and it usually arrives through characters who drift and wander. Baker gets there by the opposite route. He keeps his man busy. Lucky keeps hustling. The hustling just stops adding up to anything.

Then there is the child's body. Baker directs a real toddler as a toddler, which means the film's most consequential performer generates behavior nobody can time, and Adu improvises against it. Late in Cinema 2 Deleuze describes a cinema of the body: films that stop using bodies to execute actions and start letting them carry duration, the plain time of waiting, sitting, being in the way. The toddler is that in its purest form, staged as an obstruction, physically between every adult and every transaction. And Lucky holding him while trying to work the street is what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible in a way dialogue can't. A man with a child on his hip cannot pull. That posture is the film's entire argument about what care costs someone with no slack.

Baker cuts his own pictures, and this is where his editing shows up as a signature. He prefers the reactive cut to the anticipatory one and tolerates scenes that run past the point where they've delivered their information: overlaps, stumbles, dead air that a script-faithful edit would remove. Deleuze took the Italians' phrase for it, temps mort, dead time, the stretch where nothing advances and the everyday simply gets held. He also lets Lucky's story and Levon's collapsing marriage rhyme instead of intersect. Two plots, no collision. Screenwriting orthodoxy would force them to converge; Baker runs them side by side until they comment on each other.

Now the part that lifts this past good neorealism.

Bazin defended the Italians on the grounds that a camera hands you the world before anyone has decided what it means. The fact comes first, the interpretation later, and you trust the image because it was there. Baker takes that contract and runs it straight through a business built on objects that are not what they claim. Merchandise crowds every frame. The film's recurring question is authentication: what is a label worth, a marriage, a green card, a DNA result. And its central formal decision, the one its few reviewers argued about, is that the paternity claim never gets verified. There is no certificate scene. By the end it no longer matters, because Lucky has been behaving as the boy's father long enough that the behavior has become the fact.

That is Deleuze's powers of the false, and it's worth being exact, because it doesn't mean lying. His claim is that once cinema stops organizing itself around a truth waiting to be revealed, falsity turns productive: not a failure to be true, but a way of making something that wasn't there before. His figure for this is the forger, who doesn't counterfeit an existing truth so much as create one by insisting on it. Lucky sells fakes for a living and then forges a father, and the film's position is that the forged one is the real one. Kinship here is performed into existence. Nothing confirms it.

Baker's specific invention is that access and casting became the same act. He found Adu working security while researching the neighborhood, and Adu opened doors no permit could have opened. Performers got scripted lines and were asked to say them in their own words; Baker shot the variations on cheap solid-state media and chose in the edit for the best behavior rather than the cleanest reading. Deleuze calls this fabulation, or legending: real people caught in the act of inventing themselves on camera, neither documentary subjects nor invented characters. He thought it was the political center of modern cinema, for a specific reason. These are people of whom, in his phrase, the people are missing. Undocumented, uncounted, Ghanaian and Armenian and Lebanese and Latino, negotiating in English because it is everyone's second language. A film cannot represent a constituency that isn't recognized as one. It can only help invent it.

The craft debts are precise. Bicycle Thieves supplies the base grammar: a lead cast for his body and gait rather than his technique, a child bound to an adult's failing hustle, a plot generated by a ledger instead of by psychology. Shadows supplies the method, a written situation handed to performers who translate it into their own idiom while the camera waits reactively to catch it. Killer of Sheep supplies episodic realism built from labor, children improvising at the margins of an adult economy, no third-act machine arriving to resolve anything. The Dardennes supply the most: La Promesse for the shoulder-borne camera held at working height, trailing a body through corridors and thresholds with no score, ending on an unresolved moral admission; Rosetta for the shot glued to the nape of a neck, framing dictated by the subject's speed, the sound field built wholly from location recording so traffic and breath do a score's work; L'Enfant for the young father who treats an infant as a transactable object until the child's physical demands rewrite him.

Forward, the legacy is mostly internal and then general. The Florida Project takes the child-inside-an-adult-economy structure and gives it a composed frame. Red Rocket and Anora take the sympathetic hustler, and Karagulian's harried, self-justifying Levon is a first draft of Toros. Beyond Baker, the film stands as a proof of concept that a generation of American micro-budget filmmakers has worked inside since: a feature made for the price of a used car, shot by its director inside a real trade, with the people who live in it, and funny.

What did it do to film as an art? It moved realism's guarantee. The neorealists grounded truth in the document, in the fact that the camera was there. Baker grounds it in conduct, and reaches it through improvisation, fiction, and a room full of counterfeits. Watch it again and follow the thresholds. Then watch the last stretch and notice that nothing certifies anything, and ask whether you actually wanted it to.