(2010, English and Spanish) "Stay brown," says city-bus driver Che Rivera (Benjamin Bratt) to his Hispanic friends and fellow workers; a black buddy teasingly says to quit the "chili chatter." Living in the same apartment for 26 years in the Mission district in San Francisco, he's a widower (wife died at 22 in 1985), recovering alcoholic, and ex-con, alone raising his 18-year-old son Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez), who's about to graduate from high school and go on to UCLA.

Away from his job he restores classic cars (secretly rebuilding with his brother a '64 Chevy for his son with "The Best friend I Got. Class of '09" decaled on the rear) and on Friday nights with his pals and brother Benny (Ruben Gonzalez) proudly cruises "low and slow" in his "war pony."

Upstairs in 2A resides Lena (Erika Alexander), a young African-American employed at a women's shelter, who complains about Che's parking vehicles on the sidewalk in front of the garage; she rides a bicycle, recycles, eats organic, and prays to the Hindu goddess Kali.

When Che comes home from a Friday-night cruise after Jesse had declined to go along, as he'd used to, and finds photos of his son taken in a gay bar with an older white boy, Jordan (Max Rosenak), the usually gentle father goes ballistic: "I want you out of my house now!" After father and son fight in the street and Jesse moves in with his uncle's family, word gets out of Jesse's sexual orientation; he's harassed in the hood and at school. Looking for an opportunity, Alex, a punk kid whom Che'd ordered off his bus for playing music on his boom box, desires revenge for the humiliation.

On the long, hard road to redemption, taken low and slow, in director/writer Peter Bratt's earnest but authentic family drama in the barrio, Che becomes friends (repairing her bike) with his neighbor Lena (baking chocolate-chip cookies), who advises him: "If there ever was a time your son needed you, it's probably now." But raised in a Catholic culture with a macho mentality, Che needs plenty of time and a crisis to overcome his tendency toward violence and intimidation toward Jordan and his son's refusal to choose father over lover.

The "Class of '09" doesn't make sense to me since the story takes place in 2003 at the latest, if Jesse had been born the same year as his mother's death, unless he's not expected to graduate from college until six years after matriculation.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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