Jimmy Review: Owens' Wordless Baldwin Film Wanders Europe
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Jimmy" is the 68-minute directorial debut of photographer Yashaddai Owens, now receiving a U.S. release nearly two years after its Telluride world premiere, occupying what the review calls "no clear lane" between narrative feature and nonfiction record.
- Benny O. Arthur plays a version of James Baldwin through Istanbul and Paris, delivering a predominantly wordless performance captured in monochrome on a Bolex 16mm camera that makes no attempt to disguise the present-day locations.
- Paco Andreo composed the film's "jittery, changeable bebop rhythms" jazz score, which pauses only when Baldwin begins to write, with the amplified scritch of pencil on paper replacing the cascading music.
- The film only gives Baldwin a voice in its final minutes, when Arthur reads from Baldwin's 1972 book "No Name in the Street" — providing what the review calls "bracing, embittered context" to the sensory European tour.
- The review contrasts the film with Raoul Peck's textually rigorous "I Am Not Your Negro," characterizing "Jimmy" as a work that "doesn't aim to say much about Baldwin, but to feel and channel his general aura."
- Billy Porter announced in a 2024 Guardian interview that he planned to direct and star in a Baldwin biopic, telling the outlet "if not me, who?" — Porter was unaware, the review notes, that "Jimmy" would premiere later that same year.
Why it matters: For any filmmaker hoping to dramatize Baldwin on screen, "Jimmy" now stakes out an unusual counterpoint: a film that tries to convey Baldwin through mood, image, and silence alone — and then, in its final minutes, quietly admits that his words were needed all along. The arrival of this wordless Baldwin portrait also coincides with Billy Porter's announced biopic, meaning two very different approaches to the same subject are now entering the cultural conversation within months of each other.
