Liberty Heights

Like John Waters only without the freak show, Barry Levinson returns again to the setting for his youth, Baltimore, for a story about growing up different. It's 1954, the first year for government-mandated integration, and high school senior Ben Kurtzman (a potentially breakout performance for little-known Ben Foster) develops a crush on Sylvia, the first black girl he's ever met. Maybe it's the novelty, or the shared sense of minority (the local swim spot posts a "NO JEWS, DOGS, OR COLOREDS" sign), or the comical misinformation of his buddies about jungle fever. Or maybe it's because Ben is a natural non-conformist who enjoys doing things such as nearly unhinging the entire Semitic neighborhood of the title by dressing up as Hitler for Halloween.

Whatever, he must compete for center stage with two other cross-cultural dramas: on a whim older brother Sylvan (Adrien Brody, from The Thin Red Line) has ventured into an outlying WASP suburb just long enough to fall for a rich bohemian chick in a Cinderella outfit, while his dad Nate (Joe Mantegna), already fretting that a rumored state-run lottery would doom the lucrative numbers racket he runs out of his burlesque theater, risks losing his livelihood to a lucky reefer dealer named Little Melvin (Orlando Jones, who coincidentally was the libidinous Fuller Brush salesmen in last week's From Dusk Till Dawn 3).

Ben doesn't let Sylvia's humorless, disapproving father, or his own mother's (Bebe Neuwirth) mortification ("Kill me now! Kill me now!"), or his woeful ignorance of any Gentile culture (much less African-American), get in the way of falling for the girl and her collection Redd Foxx and R&B records. Meanwhile, Sylvan gets some help in the quest for his mystery lady (the first screen role for Carolyn Murphy, who was a VH1 Model of the Year nominee in '98) from an unexpectedly helpful goy. And everybody has a great big adventure the night Little Melvin follows Ben on his unauthorized excursion to a James Brown concert in hopes of pressuring Nate to pay up the illegal-but-honest debt.

Liberty Heights is one of those carefully crafted, story-driven films -- hopefully not the last - that occasionally turn up here on the frontier months after initial release because the Academy Awards are fast approaching. So if you want to see something other than blood on the big screen this week, it would be a good idea to catch it quickly before Leo and The Beach knock it off next weekend. B+

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