You'd think that after all the United 93s and 25th Hours and the recent rash of Iraq and torture movies, filmgoers would be pretty jaded about 9/11 by now. But when the 9/11 attacks come, glimpsed through a pair of stationary tourist binoculars, in the first act of Ilya Chaiken's Liberty Kid, it's a genuine shock. At first, you worry Kid is simply leeching emotions from a real-life tragedy. But Chaiken's film goes somewhere else. What begins as a run-of-the-mill urban drama about two guys from Brooklyn turns into something more epic and resonant.
At first glance, Derrick (Al Thompson) and Tico (Kareem Savinon) seem like your usual indie-movie down-and-outers. Holding down dead-end jobs at the Statue of Liberty during the day, hanging out with chicks and partying at night, they're a classic mismatch: Derrick wants to go to college and make something of himself, while Tico is content to just keep hanging and get by. Their lives are upended when the attacks force the Statue of Liberty to shut down, leaving them jobless. This takes the film into more dramatic territory — crime, sexual betrayal and, for one character, a stint in Iraq.
A lesser director would have played this story for cheap emotions. But to her eternal credit, Chaiken keeps her movie grounded in her characters, allowing Thompson and Savinon's true-to-life performances to carry us through what is, on paper, an elaborate plot. Along the way, the director also avoids reaching beyond her budget restrictions. Don't expect battle scenes or massive crowd scenes shot on the fly; Liberty Kid develops as a ground-level epic. We get involved in the easy banter of the streets — and before we know it, years have passed by and the world has changed. — Bilge Ebiri
