Jimmy' Brings Wordless Baldwin Portrait to U.S. Theaters — SkimNews
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- "Jimmy" is the directorial debut of photographer Yashaddai Owens, a 68-minute monochrome film shot on a Bolex 16mm camera across Turkey and France, with Benny O. Arthur playing a version of James Baldwin.
- The film was granted a U.S. release nearly two years after its Telluride world premiere, and the reviewer locates it uneasily between narrative feature, mood piece, and nonfiction record of Owens and Arthur's collaboration.
- For the first ten minutes, Baldwin is an invisible protagonist — Owens' roving camera assumes his gaze on Istanbul's streets — and he only becomes a physical presence once relocated to Paris, where the actor's resemblance is aided by Owens' bleached-out, ink-blotted graininess.
- The film is shorn of dialogue until mere minutes before its close, at which point Arthur reads from Baldwin's 1972 book No Name in the Street, with Baldwin's own words supplying what the reviewer calls "bracing, embittered context" to the otherwise sensory treatment.
- The review contrasts Owens' impressionistic approach with Raoul Peck's "I Am Not Your Negro", noting that "Jimmy" aims to channel Baldwin's general aura rather than make a textually engaged argument about him.
- The piece opens by noting that Billy Porter announced in a 2024 Guardian interview his own plan to direct and star in a Baldwin biopic, having argued that the industry had been "unduly slow to engage with Baldwin as a subject and source, relative to white authors of equivalent renown" — a critique the reviewer echoes, framing Owens' arrival as a corrective of sorts.
Why it matters: The release formalizes a quietly experimental answer to the long-standing gap Porter named: a Baldwin biopic that refuses biopic conventions almost entirely, withholding dialogue and dramatization until the final minutes. For distributors and viewers weighing Baldwin screen adaptations, "Jimmy" stakes out a third lane between conventional star-driven biopics and archival documentaries like Peck's, with Owens' photographic eye and Andreo's jazz score doing the storytelling instead of script or speech.
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