Hurricane Streets

If Truffaut had set The 400 Blows in the mean streets of New York's Lower East Side, it might have ended up looking something like this. Freeman's noirish tale of edgy inner-city youth and the problematic stepping stones a young man encounters in his effort to do the right thing is a genuinely affecting piece of NYC realism; it's a cinema vérité take on a Bowery childhood. Fifteen-year-old Marcus (Sexton) spends his days pulling minor scams -- shoplifting and such -- with his band of street-urchin thugs-in-training. They'll grab a CD here, a Walkman there, and then resell the misappropriated goods to the highest bidder outside the public school down the street, all the while zipping about on their cruisers and keeping one step ahead of the truancy cops. Parental guidance is in short supply here, as Marcus' mother (Falco) is serving out a jail sentence for allegedly smuggling illegal immigrants into the country and his grandmother Lucy (Cohen) is operating a shady neighborhood bar. It's all kicks and grins, it seems, but Marcus is a gentle soul who longs to escape the city's blight and return to New Mexico where he was born. Circumstances being what they are in Hurricane Streets, that doesn't look too likely, as emerging gang leader and quasi-pal Chip (Frank) dreams of grand theft auto and breaking and entering as a way up the criminal ladder. When Marcus meets up with Melena (Vega), a streetwise, roller-skating Latina who instantly recognizes the poet inside the budding criminal, a hesitant romance blossoms, and for a while it looks like Marcus and his new girl (who's also a victim at the hands of her abusive father) may actually make their dreams come true. No such luck, as fate conspires against the two à la Romeo and Juliet, a gun introduced in the first act goes bang in the third, and the police begin picking up the members of the Marcus' crew, one by protesting one. The remarkable thing about Freeman's film is just how well it manages to capture the intangible essence of youth without dipping overboard into pure pap sentimentality. If there's one thing Hurricane Streets isn't, it's sentimental. Rose-tinted glasses are traded in for grimy, half-shattered Ray-Bans in Freeman's world view, but the phenomenal Sexton and Vega are instantly recognizable -- and instantly believable -- as the lovestruck, tragic pair. Morgan J. Freeman (not to be confused with the actor) has a great knack for evoking the city as well, with its boggy, weedy tenement lots and the crisp, summertime joy of tear-assing around town on your best bike. It's a bracingly affecting arrival, not only for Freeman, but for newcomers Vega and Sexton as well.