'Kicks': Cruel modern fable without a moral

Kicks

unfolds with relentless despair. Its characters are violent and cruel, seemingly without ambition or empathy.

The title refers to a pair of Air Jordans, shoes that 15-year-old Brandon (Jahking Guillory) decides are his ticket to happiness. He is a small kid - his high school buddies Albert (Christopher Jordan Wallace) and Rico (Christopher Meyer) stand significantly taller - and salvation comes when he discovers a man selling stolen sneakers out of the back of his car.

Brandon buys them, getting the respect he thinks he deserves, at least until Flaco (Kofi Siriboe), an older kid from the neighborhood, steals the shoes from him. What follows is an epic journey through Oakland and the East Bay to steal them back, one that escalates into deadly stakes.

Writer-director Justin Tipping declines to give the audience a reason to empathize with Brandon, except that he is a victim. Kicks is gritty to the core, and its commitment to verisimilitude is its undoing. All of the characters are selfish, and their sense of loyalty is purely circumstantial.

Tipping's artful style is relatively ambiguous, focusing mostly on cheap visceral thrills, to the point where it's impossible to glean what he thinks about the depths to which Brandon will go.

There are surreal sequences in which a faceless astronaut, complete with a space suit, mimics Brandon's feelings or pain. The astronaut offers little insight, only a minor reprieve from the miserable violence.

This blank cipher is not a tool for insight, empathy, or even condemnation. Instead, the fantasy elements in Kicks only add to the cruelty.

If this is a modern fable, where the shoes serve as a metaphor, then it lacks a fable's most crucial element: a moral.

Kicks

s1/2 (Out of four stars)

Directed by Justin Tipping. With Jahking Guillory, Christopher Jordan Wallace, Christopher Meyer. Distributed by

Focus World.

Running time: 1 hour, 20 mins.

Parent's guide: R (pervasive language, violence, and drug use, all involving teenagers).

Playing at: Local theaters.

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