‘Will' Review: Heartache and Hope in Harlem
In the 1981 drama 'Will' — directed by Jessie Maple — Will (Obaka Adedunyo) is trying to gut out heroin withdrawal. Gripping his stomach, the onetime all-American basketball player is sweat soaked, his sleep punctuated with flashbacks to his time on the court. When his wife, Jean (Loretta Devine, in her film debut), returns to their apartment in Harlem and finds Will struggling, she asks why he's so set on getting clean without help. 'Nobody turned me onto this' but me, he says angrily. 'And I've got to kick it myself, even if it kills me.'
Will's theory of going it alone changes when he takes a mentoring shine to Little Brother (Robert Dean) who, at 12, is already drawn to drugs. Will brings Little Brother into his and Jean's home and also starts to coach a girls basketball team. He attends a local meeting run by a self-assured espouser of positive thinking. Things are looking up for him.
'Will,' the first independent feature-length film by an African American woman, was listed on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2024. (A year after the drama debuted, the playwright Kathleen Collins' semi autobiographical drama 'Losing Ground' was released.) The recent 4K restorations of these films by Black female filmmakers have added depth to cinema's historical record and offered tantalizing threads to tug for archivists and scholars.
With its rough-hewed realism, 'Will' is remarkable not so much for its craft as for its philosophical depth in portraying the tensions between a struggling individual and his community, which can be both supportive and enabling. Where there's a Will, there's a way? With its balance of heartache and hope, the film suggests there could be.
WillNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters.
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