Things Never Said movie review (2013)

Still, the feature debut from Murray, a veteran TV writer and producer ("Third Watch," "Criminal Minds"), offers a slice of life we don't see enough of in films: that of a married, middle-class black couple, in all its realism and romance. Between this, "Pariah" and "Middle of Nowhere" in the past couple of years, such a setting has provided rich material for indie dramas to explore.

Hampton's Kalindra Stepney is a waitress at a soul food restaurant in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles. But she spends nearly all of her evenings honing her craft at local open-mike nights and dreams of performing at the famed Nuyorican Poets Café in New York. She's never been east of Bakersfield, but with her intense, mesmerizing eyes and strong, grounded demeanor, there's no doubt she'll get there someday.

But her husband, Ronnie (Elimu Nelson), is too busy feeling sorry for himself to be supportive of her. A former high school basketball star now working at a gas station after a career-ending injury, Ronnie wallows in what could have been. He's never even bothered to see his wife perform on stage.

Murray efficiently and fluidly uses a montage to explain how they got to this distant state: high school courtship, pregnancy, marriage, fighting, physical abuse, miscarriage and finally, silence.

So it's no wonder that Kalindra finds herself receptive to the advances of a charming, fantastic-looking regular in the audience who's such a fan, he can recite her words back to her. (The fact that he's such an unabashed groupie of hers, in a reversal of traditional gender roles, is a nice twist.) At first she's dismissive of the hunky, tattooed Curtis (Hardwick), but quickly it becomes clear that he can provide her with all the love she's been missing.

And it just so happens that he's an aspiring poet himself. Reminiscent of the conceit in the excellent and inventive musical "Once," in which Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova would just begin performing in the midst of conversation rather than bursting into song, Kalindra and Curtis craft poems for each other during quiet, intimate moments as a means of foreplay. It's an extension of who they are and how they relate to each other; it's also a rather quaint, romantic notion for such a contemporary setting, this idea that poetry is all around us and we just need to open our ears to its rhythms.