The coming-of-age/coming out story is one of the most belabored and often told narratives in LGBT culture (literature, films, theater) and will likely continue to be so for a while to come. That’s in large part because the act and process of young people coming out takes place daily, hourly, around the globe in myriad contexts and a host of cultural, political, social, and religious frameworks. There’s always a sense of (often life or death) urgency in it for someone somewhere, despite all the strides made on queer equality. That’s going to be true for a long time yet. In Naz & Maalik, writer-director Jay Dockendorf turns his camera on the secret romance and hidden and public struggles of African American Muslim teens Naz and Maalik, capturing layers of the coming out/of age tale almost never addressed in non-fiction cinema.
Still from Naz & Maalik. Courtesy Wolfe Video
Told over the course of a single day, their story encompasses racial and religious profiling, sibling rivalries, and the tensions of being queer and Muslim. But all of that is in the context of a film that is largely headily exuberant as the boys canvass the city hawking body oils, Lotto tickets, and Catholic saint cards, with a stop to attend prayer service at a mosque. They work their potent charm on both prospective customers and the viewer alike, joking and flirting with one another as their conversation sprawls across topics. (A nice, timely touch is when Maalik playfully calls Naz out for selling the Catholic cards with, “Man, that’s appropriation.”)
There’s irony in the fact that in many ways the two are most free in public spaces, safe from familial prying eyes and expectations. It’s a freedom seized by Maalik (Curtiss Cook Jr.), while Naz (Kerwin Johnson Jr.) can never fully relax, never fully pull himself from under the watch of the unseen but powerful “them” (family, society, religious figures) that often force him to nervously pull away from gestures of public affection. Without being too heavy handed, director Dockendorf has the two boys represent the push and pull felt by many queer folk in this cultural moment where much has changed but much hasn’t, and calibrating and recalibrating one’s psyche and comfort zones to be yourself but also be safe is a mind-fuck.
Still from Naz & Maalik. Courtesy Wolfe Video
The fragile irony of the couple being more free in public spaces than at home is shattered by the reality that black bodies are actually especially vulnerable in public spaces. (See: today’s news.) But the film’s illustration of that reality is where it wobbles. Its depiction of the ham-fisted efforts at entrapment by an undercover FBI agent, which pulls the boys onto the radar of an almost cartoonishly villainous FBI higher-up, is forced and unconvincing, playing almost like it belongs in another (and inferior) movie. That subplot, and the muddled one in which the boys try to kill a chicken to prepare for a birthday celebration in the film’s third act, slightly derail the film but don’t dilute its power.
Still from Naz & Maalik. Courtesy Wolfe Video
Dockendorf’s efforts to sketch all the boys are up against, even as they carve a space to explore their love, eventually gets away from him, but not enough to fully undo what he gets right. There’s the lovely look of the film, which manages to capture the grit and grime of the city while also casting it in something of a romantic glow. We see the film through the eyes of the young lovers at its center. And then there’s the casting. Johnson and Cook nail their performances; the film soars as high as it does because of them and their easy chemistry. But there’s also much to be said just for casting two dark-skinned actors in this romance, priming the camera to capture a kind of male beauty too rarely seen or celebrated as such on any major American cultural platform.
Naz & Maalik is now playing in New York at Cinema Village.
