a love story vulgar

'Bruiser' (2022) doesn’t deserve to be buried in the streaming archives

After Darious (Jalyn Hall) returns from boarding school, a teenager’s game of slapsies with his childhood friend, Mike (Jonah Bishop-Pirrone) plummets sharply into a scuffle. It’s a vicious but childish scrap that captures a bittersweet truth of Black boyhood; we are only ever a few minor invasions–snide remarks or unwarranted touches–away from being roped into a fight.

Miles Warren’s Bruiser centres this truth to tell a sombre coming-of-age story about a paternal love triangle. Malcolm (Shamier Anderson) is the dad that Darious has always known, a stoic and driven car salesman who labours to secure his son’s private school scholarships and preaches restraint from violence in every circumstance. Porter (Trevante Rhodes) is the returning father who abandoned Darious when he was a baby. Despite the wilderness of Porter’s past, he’s emotionally unfettered with Darious and willing to use his own head as a speed ball if it means teaching his son how to throw a punch (in self defence, of course).

The two father figures are former brothers-in-arms, united by an elusive history of grievous inflictions of harm. Their capacity for violence is still inside of them and is pivotal to how they handle their relationship with Darious.
Malcolm shoulders respectability to give Darious a privileged life but his connection to his son never runs deeper than the provision of food, shelter and obligatory safety. He does his best to repress his aggressive side but it spills out of him in the form of emotionally unavailability, dishonesty and volatility.

In his 13-year absence from Darious’ life, Porter has found inner peace with his capacity for violence but only after following it to a harrowing and clinical end. At the state fair, he confesses to Darious that he was a drone pilot in the air force tasked with killing people from afar and that his tattoo–a blind snake on his wrist–is a reminder that he isn’t an evil man but someone who was puppeteered by evil men. The juxtaposition of Porter’s sincere vulnerability and his chilling back story gives us pause.

Darious’ mother Monica (Shinelle Azoroh) is scooped into Bruiser’s margins because a more prominent presence from her would detract from what the film wants to explore about the violent capacity Darious has inherited from Malcolm and Porter. She wafts in and out of scenes as peacekeeper, the one who knows best but is never heard, the one who is open to forgiveness, who provides measured responses and takes the initiative to teach Darious to drive where Malcolm desperately begs to be asked. She is there and she is there well but her warmth is suffocated by the ever-ascending tension.

There are times when Bruiser drifts into the shadows to flirt with the cinematic dialects of the horror genre, amplifying suspense around the possibility of violence. There are times when the camera lingers long on a character’s discomfort and it's as if the atmosphere itself becomes the sole storyteller. These are when Bruiser thrives. Lia Ouyang Rusli’s scintillating score pairs with Justin Derry’s lyrical cinematography to make for a syrupy one-two punch that weighs an artistic ton. Black men’s capacity for violence isn’t a subject that you can narrativise lightly, but Bruiser explores these familial tensions and internal struggles with grace, free from stereotypical judgement. We aren’t given the luxury of flashbacks to understand the circumstances these men had to endure. We only have their word and their current iteration–and the film navigates the pressure between their present selves with a keen awareness of how frightening the threat of violence can be and how corrosive the presence of it is.

Still, Bruiser is best understood as a love story–albeit a vulgar one. The shattering exchange of body blows between the two father figures at the film’s climax is the rough stuff of prophecies, their fists land with thick, percussive thuds to exhibit a gross mutation of what we’ve been taught to understand about love stories since we heard our earliest fairy tales. You fight for what you love. Malcolm and Porter both love Darious. But it is a love that reeks of ownership. The friction between them is less about what is best for Darious and more about their sovereignty over his life. 

Bruiser concludes like the estranged African-American brother of Mignonnes (2020). While Amy chooses to go outside and jump rope until she feels like she’s flying, Darious chooses to leave the fight behind, drive away and sing the song his mamma loves to play for him to his heart’s content. They find solace in rejecting the binary choice that is thrust upon them, unsure of what to do next but content with the possibility of discovering a new way. Darious refuses doom. And it is in the ambiguity of hope that the true love story begins.