A 13-year-old pining for a girl, struggling to make friends and pushing boundaries at home isn’t exactly groundbreaking material, but if said 13-year-old is a black kid recently relocated to Heidelberg, Germany, by his widowed dad, the story gets more interesting.
Morris (Markees Christmas) is a kid in a Yankees cap obsessed with rap, surrounded by German teenagers more partial to EDM. His German tutor Inka (Carla Juri) encourages him to practice his second language at the youth center, but the kids call him Big Mac or Kobe and expect him to be good at basketball, and the counselor confronts him with a joint and asks if he’s been passing them out. Forget the language barriers between rap and EDM or German and English—Morris constantly faces assumptions because of his race and nationality. His otherness is visible, and it brings that feeling of 13-year-old alienation to light in a powerful way.
Of course there’s a girl, Katrin (Lina Keller)—a 15-year-old blonde, half woman, half child, who smokes cigarettes and gets on the back of a motorcycle with an older DJ. Her influence on Morris puts him at odds with his cool, laid-back dad, Curtis (Craig Robinson), who’s also trying to navigate their new life in a foreign country. And Katrin’s fondness for Morris is as murky as it felt during your own teenage years—she pulls him in with one arm as she holds him back with the other.
Writer-director Chad Hartigan holds the script and visuals with even weight, and the two work so cohesively that everything packs an emotional punch even though you’ve experienced it before. Morris’ dialogue is that of a real teen—short but betraying a lot going on under the surface. Strong performances across the board are aided by shots so gorgeous and giddy that they feel like they’re from the cinema instead of just a movie.
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“Morris From America” is slow and meandering on purpose. “You are young,” Inka tells Morris after she spies him and Katrin dancing exuberantly at a party. “And there’s no rush to be old. There’s no rush to be boring.” The film is in no rush either, sometimes to its detriment. But its grasp on growing up is so strong that by the end, it’s hard to care how you got there.
3 stars (out of four)