In light of the events that have currently overtaken our media coverage, one would consider it hard to review a film like Fruitvale Station without mentioning them and turning this entry into a political commentary. Lucky for you, I don’t fancy myself a journalist nor do I maintain an educated political opinion. I steer clear of the news and the feeding frenzy it makes of people’s lives. Given my personal choice to remain ignorant, I am going to leave politics out and will stick to what I know. I know what a good film looks like, and Fruitvale Station lives up to the Sundance award-winning hype. I went into the theatre only having read a brief synopsis about the movie, and I came out broken hearted.

Fruitvale Station is based on the true story of 22-year old Oscar Grant, an Oakland native and convicted felon who was shot by a police officer after getting into a fight on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train on New Year’s Day 2009. Written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Ryan Coogler, a fellow Bay Area native who was a graduate student at the University of Southern California at the time that Grant was killed, the film is a depiction of the last day of Grant’s life and the series of events that led to his death. Though it is hard to know how much fact there is behind the final hours penned in the script, Coogler wastes no time in demonstrating that the manner in which Grant was killed was very real—the film begins with the now viral video of the shooting, making the remainder of the movie that much harder to turn away from.

Portrayed by Michael B. Jordan (The Wire), Oscar is a charming but afflicted father struggling to find a way out of the drug-dealing life that has left him short of credibility, most notably from his mother and the mother of his little girl. Jordan is an ace at demonstrating the duality of the way Oscar lives his life—he loves his daughter, but he’s cheating on her mother; he is kind to customers at the supermarket that he was fired from, but he is quick to threaten his boss with violence for not giving him his job back. You can tell that Oscar is just trying to make it right, and Jordan makes it so you can’t peel your eyes off of him for a second. Whether parts of the story are embellished to get a point across becomes irrelevant. It felt real to me because in Jordan’s Oscar and Melonie Diaz’s Sophina (Raising Victor Vargas), I recognized people I went to high school and college with. Ultimately, they are kids trying to do the best they can as products of the community they came up in. With that, I believe Coogler achieves exactly what he set out to: he transforms the story of Oscar Grant from another news article about racial profiling and police brutality issued at the hands of a white cop towards a black kid, and brings to light the weight of the life that was lost for no reason.