Film Details

Set in contemporary Chicago but largely shot in Cleveland last year, the film directorial debut of celebrated visual artist Rashid Johnson is an adaptation of Richard Wright’s seminal 1940 novel about the black experience in America. Ashton Sanders (Moonlight) plays Bigger Thomas, a young African American man from the inner city who takes a job as live-in chauffeur for a wealthy white businessman, thus experiencing a seductive new world of money and power and entering into a precarious relationship with his boss’s daughter (Margaret Qualley of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood ). Johnson’s movie resonates with his visual art, including sculptural works like Shea Wall (1970/2017), shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland's 2017 exhibition, A Poet*hical Wager. With KiKi Layne (If Beale Street Could Talk); screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Cleveland theatrical premiere. DCP. 104 min.