North Star (2022)
Run time: 30 minutes; now available free on YouTube and on the movie’s website (below)
Married couple Jimmy (Colman Domingo) and Craig (Malcolm Gets) at rest in North Star
I don’t always understand when a movie reviewer warns readers or listeners that a movie will “sneak up on you”. It hints that the story’s emotional payoff may come later than you expect and could take you by surprise.
Well, that’s right on target when it comes to North Star. I didn’t realize how deep it was burrowing under my skin. I felt defenseless against the harrowing blows it struck in a mere 30 minutes.
By the end I was as overcome as if I’d just watched a two-hour movie.
It begins in the dark. We’re in a bedroom on a Northern California ranch right before a chilly dawn. At the sound of an alarm clock, Jimmy (Colman Domingo) rises, dresses and steps into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. Nothing unusual there.
Warmed, he dons a coat and cowboy hat and steps into a cold morning to start what looks like an ordinary rancher’s day.
But details suggest that matters aren’t quite so simple. When Jimmy briefly pets his two dogs, we catch a glimpse of his wedding ring.
Moments later, he lights and puffs on what we’ll come to realize is a joint, and the gold band glimmers in the early morning dark.
We can’t help wondering: Who’s he married to?
He feeds the lone horse in the barn and leads him out to pasture, affectionately calling the animal by its name, North Star. Scanning the sky uneasily, he stops to stare wistfully at the horse as it begins to graze.
Is this a routine morning, I asked myself. Jimmy is Black. Is that going to matter here?
Back in the house, Jimmy gently wakes Craig (Malcolm Gets), his severely impaired partner, who’s white. We never do find out exactly what’s happened to Craig, but he’s unable to speak and breathes through a tube from an oxygen tank.
His lower body is paralyzed, and once Jimmy removes the adult diaper Craig has worn through the night, he carries the near helpless man into the bathroom, where they sink into the tub to share a warm bath.
As they’re nestled together in the tub, Jimmy lights another joint and blows smoke into Craig’s nostrils. I felt my spirits lift a bit at Craig’s warm, wan smile and the sight of his gold wedding band.
Husband and husband, facing their day.
But later when Jimmy tries to feed Craig the eggs he’s carefully prepared, Craig can’t swallow and falls to weeping. Clearly, he’s troubled.
Both men soon have abundant reason to feel even worse. Craig’s sister Erin (Audrey Wasilewski) arrives bearing medications she’s bought at discount in Canada and announces that she’s come alone because her sons are with their father at “Bible camp”.
As it happens, Erin is an evangelical Christian who views homosexuality as an abomination. Hate the sin, Love the sinner is a maxim she lives by.
This is a quietly wrenching story of love beset from multiple sides, and I found the quelled, staunch dignity Colman and Gets bring to Jimmy and Craig touching.
Busying herself in the kitchen and caring for Craig, who’s seated nearby, she grabs a telephone with a long cord and informs a friend on the line how dismayed she is that Jimmy keeps Craig “out here” on a remote ranch when she and her family would be glad to care for him.
Craig, unable to speak, hears his sister’s every word. His eyes fill with sadness.
To further twist the knife, Erin turns on the TV to watch a pair of homophobic televangelists (Kevin Bacon and Laura Innes) cheerily spew anti-gay rhetoric, as if they were only speaking obvious truth.
Jimmy, Erin complains to her friend, won’t hear of moving Craig, insisting the two are “fine where we are”.
Which may be true. But we’ve seen Jimmy hide in a kitchen drawer a Notice of Foreclosure, and when Erin discovers it, her bile comes roaring out.
Why, she wails, won’t Jimmy let Craig come and live with his family?
Jimmy insists that Craig is with his family: “He’s my husband.”
With the ranch they love close to being taken away, Jimmy and Craig are suddenly like a frightened couple clinging to all they believe for sure they can trust: each other.
Jimmy (Colman Domingo) longs to safeguard his home and his marriage in North Star
This is a quietly wrenching story of love beset from multiple sides, and I found the quelled, staunch dignity Colman and Gets bring to Jimmy and Craig touching.
But writer-director P.J. Palmer, who’s gay, doesn’t just let anti-gay bigotry sit there. He makes it scrape our nerves just as it eats away at the union Jimmy and Craig are fighting to protect.
Wasilewski does marvelously convincing — irritating — work. Erin scarily embraces an intolerance that seems like it won’t give an inch. Yet when Craig kisses her on the cheek, even he doesn’t doubt that his sister actually loves him.
Gets gives an eloquent performance without uttering a word. Craig fully comprehends that he and Jimmy are in deeper trouble than ever, and his clinging to Jimmy with only his frightened eyes is tough to watch.
Domingo makes Jimmy’s caring and decency feel bone deep as he increasingly comes under attack. He faces the looming possibility of losing his ranch, leaving himself and Craig with much longer odds of making a go of it together.
Even worse, he struggles to keep their marriage alive even as Craig’s time in it may be running out.
Domingo, all plainspoken integrity here, oozed cool, sensuous sophistication as Cutler, the smooth as molasses band leader in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). His range is impressive.
Later this year we’ll be able to see him in an altogether different guise in Rustin, a biopic directed, like Ma Rainey, by George C. Wolfe.
It will portray the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a prime mover in the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin was a brilliant as well as a sadly, profoundly closeted gay man.
Domingo is openly, proudly gay. Which promises that, as here with Jimmy, he could bring illuminating empathy to the torn, haunted Rustin.
That tireless leader acted on a national stage in an era when his sexuality had an even more tangled, bitter resonance than Jimmy’s.
Now that I’ve seen more of Domingo’s work, I look forward to witnessing him, as Rustin, sing the song of a transcendent gay Black man – cruelly unsung, rightly resurrected and, I’m fully prepared to believe, duly honored.
North Star has been awarded more than 50 festival wins. I learned about this stunning short movie from a review by Joey Moser on the Oscar and movie site Awards Daily (Awardsdaily – The Oscars, the Films and everything in between.).
That fascinating website is home to what’s easily the liveliest movie give-and-take I’ve engaged in over the last decade. It will amply reward your attention.
North Star can be seen free here: