Yashaddai Owens’ debut feature Jimmy, though it follows James Baldwin at a pivotal moment in his life, cannot accurately be called a biopic. Rather, in its depiction of a young Baldwin (Benny O. Arthur) meandering around Paris, Owens’ film is more of a loosely narrative collage or a city symphony with Baldwin at its center. It is a cinematic gesture made with clear admiration for its iconic subject, but Owens proves unable to render Baldwin with any depth, or even a clear point of view. Baldwin, a man known for his linguistic virtuosity and moral conviction, is reduced to a flat, aestheticized image.
Owens, who also produced, wrote, and shot Jimmy, opens the film with a contextless montage of images from Istanbul, another city where Baldwin lived for a time. Owens then takes the viewer to Paris, where Baldwin — billed here as the titular Jimmy — steps into a taxi and explains to the driver that he has just arrived from New York City. Gazing with wonder at the Arc de Triomphe from the backseat, this incarnation of Baldwin comes across at first as a tourist, and the following scenes of the film — in which his activities include lounging about his small room, smoking cigarettes, and taking notes at a café over a croissant — do not do much to dispel this depiction. Jimmy’s only contact with others in the film occurs when another young man approaches him at a café and strikes up a rapport; Jimmy brings him back to his room and they have sex. Otherwise, Jimmy is only seen engaging in solo activities, with his thoughts, reflections, and desires rendered inscrutable under images of prosaic city life.
Owens delivers a decidedly vintage aesthetic: he shoots on black-and-white 16 mm film, and a score composed by Paco Andreo that recalls midcentury jazz accompanies nearly every frame. Andreo’s appealing compositions, percussive and layered with Gershwin-esque horn riffs and chromatic chord progressions, are the film’s most effective component. Owens’ photography unfortunately does not measure up. The 16 mm film is often blurry or washed-out to the extent that images are hard to make out; especially problematic are the number of shots where Arthur’s facial features are rendered indistinct by the film stock. These visual issues, which make the film appear like a period-appropriate home movie, would be understandable if Owens committed entirely to a naturalistic depiction of Paris in 1948, yet he does not convincingly mask the fact that the film was shot in 2024. The scene in which Jimmy rides his first Paris taxi, for example, is jarring in its anachronisms: he rides in a vintage car, but the roads are filled with obviously contemporary models. No discernible link is made between Baldwin’s 1948 and Paris in the 2020s, nor is any compelling argument made for the temporal collision. Rather, Jimmy’s jumbled aesthetics read as if the filmmaker attempted to commit to period detail, but was hamstrung by the realities of shooting in a major city on a small budget.
In a late scene of this brief film, Arthur shares a piece of Baldwin’s writing in voiceover as Jimmy is depicted typing at his desk. The passage, from No Name in the Street, is stirring, with characteristically lucid reflections on the differing manifestations of the same system of racial oppression in France and the United States. Unfortunately, Owens has given no indication of the probing mind that produced such writing in Jimmy, choosing instead to render a surface-level depiction of James Baldwin. It is admirable that Owens chooses to show a looser, more everyday side of Baldwin than his towering legacy often allows for, and the film’s jazzy rhythms may appeal to some viewers inclined to appreciate the film as an affectionate time capsule. Yet Jimmy fails to offer a vision of James Baldwin to serve as a suitable supplement to his indelible body of work.
DIRECTOR: Yashaddai Owens; CAST: Benny O. Arthur; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: July 31; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 7 min.
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