Review

Southside With You review: even Obama haters will love Barack and Michelle's date movie

Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter in Southside With You
Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter in Southside With You


Director: Richard Tanne. Starring: Parker Sawyers, Tika Sumpter, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Phillip Edward Van Lear. 12A cert, 84 mins.

Being the leader of the free world has never looked like a walk in the park, but Richard Tanne’s Southside With You turns a walk in the park into a dry run for just that. This clear-eyed and compulsively charming romantic comedy gives a semi-fictional account of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date in Chicago, 1989 – an event described in undramatic terms by the outgoing US President in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope – just a trip to the cinema to see Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing and a shared ice cream. But here it’s imbued with the eye-catching lustre of momentousness-in-waiting. 

Southside With You all but begs you to unpick every line and gesture for shivery echoes of the future, and it’s to first-time writer-director Tanne’s credit – and, equally, that of his perfectly chosen leads, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter – that the film not only withstands but thrives under such scrutiny.

As a romance, we know exactly where this is going. (Though the same could be said of almost every romantic film ever made.) But as a multi-faceted character study – of a couple, a nation, a racial identity – there are surprises around every corner.

The film opens on Michelle (Sumpter), rather than her would-be wooer – getting dressed, fixing her hair, and generally going to “an awful lot of trouble for just another smooth talker,” as her mother (Vanessa Bell) drily observes. From the start, to coin a topical slogan, we’re with her – which positions Barack (Sawyers) as the unknown quantity.

Accordingly, when Tanne cuts to him relaxing in an armchair, drawing peckishly on a cigarette, there’s less to go on. Or there is until Sawyers deploys a certain look – a downturned half-frown, head tipped slightly back – that’s such an unmistakable Obama Manoeuvre, the character immediately flashes to life.

In his performance, Sawyers smartly avoids broad impersonation (Sumpter too, for that matter, though of the two she’s the uncannier lookalike). But his body language is so diligently matched to his subject’s that it’s soon shockingly easy to believe you’re watching the real thing. (It’s also coded into his costume: shirt sleeves rolled up to just below the elbow, vest just visible underneath, and so on.)

Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter in Southside With You

In Michelle’s opening conversation with her parents, we learn she’s a tenacious second-year associate at a law firm where Barack is a garrulous summer intern. She insists, to both them and him, that this meet-up isn’t a date – a disavowal born of cautiousness, she later explains, over being seen by her superiors to pounce on “the first cute black guy to come through the door”.

In a short exchange, the film makes a black woman’s fight to be taken seriously in a traditionally white male profession crisply tangible – yet it never feels finger-waggy because Sumpter makes every syllable feel like it springs from lived experience. 

They make a detour to an art gallery to look at paintings of black American life by Ernie Barnes, and Barack recites the Gwendolyn Brooks poem We Real Cool. The fact he’s obviously trying to impress his not-date defangs the scene’s art-history lesson quality, but again, the actual point – its questioning of the place of blackness in America’s story, then, now and later – sticks like superglue.

The wisdom comes so lightly and without labour, Southside With You feels nothing like an ordinary political biopic: it shares far more movie DNA with Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s great romantic-comic wander through Vienna, that seems to stumble over some new big truth on every other cobblestone.

Take the community meeting in a church that serves as the film’s dramatic centrepiece. “Where their needs align with our needs, that’s where things get done,” Barack offers while pitching a scheme to win over developers to the building of a new community centre: Obama the pragmatist, the careful progress-maker, the broker of necessary compromise in action. (Those skills come in equally useful later on, in a scene crackling with crossed perspectives, in which a middle-aged, white partner at Michelle and Barack’s law firm quizzes them about the Spike Lee film.)

It’s that central community centre sequence in which Barack wins over Michelle, and theoretically Southside With You’s audience while he’s at it. And while the blunt idea – a small speech becomes a stirring treatise on America’s baked-in problems and promise – has the tawny glow of Hollywood-grown corn, its execution hums with sincerity.

Only the kind of die-hard Obama sceptic who’d never watch this film in a thousand years anyway could fail to be even just a little impressed – which goes for the film as a whole, too. It’s far from hagiography, but it’s unmistakably a love story.

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