I suspect the fact that I recognise Chiwetel Ejiofor mainly from the British Airways safety video does not reflect well upon me, even as someone who doesn’t watch many films. But now I also know him for Rob Peace, a film for which he wrote the adaptation of the book, directed, and starred in, playing the titular character’s father.

This is a biographical film. Rob Peace is shown to be a precocious child born to a poor, black family in the US in 1980. During his childhood, his father is imprisoned for murder, though his family has doubts about the safety of the conviction. With a lot of hard work, Peace ends up securing a place at Yale. He begins to sell drugs while there to fund his father’s appeal, and the discovery of this plot puts paid to his desire to pursue a doctorate.

He moves onto a real estate career through which he intends to improve the neighbourhood in which he grew up, though his longer-term plans are scuppered by the financial crash. He once again takes to selling drugs in order to refund the money his friends had invested in his venture, though he is shot dead in the process.

Biography is hard, and it seems to me that biography on film must be even harder: how do you cram a life into a couple of hours? This film doesn’t quite crack that nut: it’s tonally uneven, and it does a lot of ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’, sometimes in quite peculiar ways. For example, we are told that Peace has a particular talent for bringing people together and that a party he has organised has an attendance list drawn from many different social groups, rather than shown this. He has a romantic relationship which we don’t see enough of to be truly invested in, but also shown more than just a ‘hint’ of. Some of the choices struck me as downright odd.

The other issue with this film—and it’s surely one of the challenges of biography—is that I don’t think it gets the balance right between the focus on its subject and the ripples of influence they have. Everything here is focused on Peace: we don’t really get to understand and appreciate his positive impact on others (though his housing project, for example), nor any negative impact (upon the people to whom he sold drugs, for example). This left it feeling a little bit insular, and it felt like this undercut the film’s attempt to meaningfully dive into some of the bigger social challenges the film raises.

But, nevertheless, I enjoyed this. This didn’t completely work for me, but I would like to see more of this sort of thing: it was close to being excellent.

The film was carried by its main star, Jay Will, who is magnetic and completely believable in the role. He must surely have a huge acting career ahead of him. Weirdly, I thought the weakest link among the actors was Ejiofor himself, whose character seemed utterly inconsistent from scene to scene—though perhaps this was more the fault of his writing than his acting.

I think this is worth going to see.