Stephan James in 'Ricky.' “Sometimes you’ve got to be bold about it,” Sheryl Lee Ralph says. The Emmy winner is among the first to log onto a Zoom conversation about her new film Ricky, and before all have even arrived, nicely sums up their movie’s journey of defying expectations.
Coming from first-time feature director Rashad Frett with a producing team including Sterling Brim, also making his film debut, Ricky premiered 16 months ago at Sundance to wide acclaim and won the festival competition’s directing prize. The drama, intricately focused on a 30-year-old man’s reintegration into society after being incarcerated since his teens, featured powerhouse performances from Ralph and If Beale Street Could Talk alum Stephan James. But in a challenged and changing indie film landscape, distributors didn’t bite as hoped — and the opportunity to get creative presented itself.
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Bold, indeed.
With facilitation by Blue Harbor Entertainment, Ricky is being self-distributed, with filmmakers still holding the rights as they gear up for an April 24 theatrical release. A Kickstarter campaign also helped drive its targeted focus. “We wanted to make sure that people who are actually affected by recidivism and the imprisonment system could see this film,” Brim says. “I wanted to make sure that people in Chicago, people in Detroit and any of the big cities that you think about that have Black and brown people and marginalized groups could see this film.”
Sheryl Lee Ralph in Ricky. Frett says he “grew up in the environment” of Ricky, absorbing many of the narratives and situations depicted in the film from when he was young. He’d been focused on documentaries before making an initial short of the same name. The film is marked by its verisimilitude: Frett maintains a rigorous focus on the realities of life after incarceration, the script hitting at times painfully realistic beats while the filmmaking embraces the chaos of life as it happens.
“I wanted to make this film as visceral and as real as possible, so I was telling my cinematographer, ‘Find the shots, find the frame,’” Frett says. “We were on the headset and I’m constantly in his ear: ‘Just follow the movement.’”
James, who plays the eponymous role, adds, “It felt like a film that was made with intention, with purpose. Every frame of that film was calculated…. You’re dealing with a 15-year-old boy entering adulthood for the first time [at 30]. As a character study, it was just so fascinating.” He spent extensive time with teenagers to observe the way they move through and process the world. “I had to get into the psychology of a 15-year-old boy,” he says. This is essentially where we meet Ricky no matter his literal age: “I took real pride in understanding the full picture.”
Ralph portrays Ricky’s parole officer Joanne, and was drawn to working with James as well as the story itself. “We don’t see a lot of stories about successful young Black men, marginalized young men coming out and having the life that they’ve dreamed of,” she says. “This script spoke so well about so many things that these young men face coming out of the system, and how they get involved in the system to begin with.”
The film’s success at Sundance did not yield much commercial interest — a larger issue for last year’s competition among American narrative features, many of which took around a year to find distribution. (Grand Jury Prize winner Atropia was acquired in October, 10 months after the festival.) “We navigated it as best as possible with the type of film this is,” Frett says.
“We’re trying to be creative with this industry changing and finding out new ways to get quality independent films out there — and being a young producer, you don’t want to watch anything that you make die,” Brim adds. “For these people involved, I just knew we had to make sure this lived and that it could live amongst the people that it needed to live amongst.”
So that’s exactly what the Ricky filmmakers started doing. Various screenings have taken place over the past year aimed at direct community engagement. Ralph attended one at the men’s prison San Quentin Rehabilitation Center that included a Q&A, and remains deeply moved by the memory of it.
“We were in a room with men who were very much like the character in the movie — some of them had aged up, but they had still been that character; some of them were that character right at that moment,” Ralph says. “There were moments when the movie was screening, you could hear a pin drop…. Their response was so, ‘Whoa.’ And there were moments in the film where they started talking back to the film…. It was a moment to be a human being with other human beings trying to figure out what the next step would be, even if they were in their 20s and they wouldn’t be out for another 50 years. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
“People are going to see this film and say, ‘Wow, I’m seeing myself in a way I’ve never seen myself,’” James says. “‘People are looking at me, I’m being seen.’ That’s really the greatest testament in being able to make a film like this.”
There will be a learning curve as the theatrical launch looms for this group of artists, all embarking on this kind of independent release for the first time. Frett teaches directing at Brooklyn College and admits even the promotional aspects of Ricky have been a little daunting. Brim came into Ricky following his longtime stint as a cohost of the comedy clip show Ridiculousness, and with his fellow producers has not taken the easy — or safe — rollout path. But no one involved seems to be second-guessing the choice, no matter how new it all feels. In their eyes, this was the right, even obvious move; they barely feel the need to explain it.
Leave it to Ralph, though, to do just that.
“The offers didn’t come — or they were late to come, or slow to come — and people didn’t know if they wanted to touch this subject. That happens so often when it’s an independent film that has something to say about people who so often get marginalized — whether they’re in prison, out of prison — just because of who and what they are,” Ralph says. “So it is bold to say, ‘You know what? If you’re not going to open up the door for me here, I think enough about the work that I have created to go out and say we’re going to do it ourselves. We’re four-walling this thing ourselves because we refuse for you not to see it.’”
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