In Sundance darling Morris From America, which was released on Friday, the titular character (Markees Christmas) is a 13-year-old American who has just moved to Heidelberg, Germany, for his dad Curtis’ (Craig Robinson) new job as a soccer coach. Morris, a chubby, introverted kid with dreams of becoming a world-famous rapper, has difficulties making friends with his peers at the local youth center; they are hardly keen to roll out the red carpet for their new classmate. Except, that is, for Katrin, the lithe, blond-haired, slightly older girl whom Morris is attracted to upon first sight. By most Western standards, Katrin is the grade-school epitome of cool: She’s popular, parties at raves, and has an older, university-aged boyfriend who rides a motorbike. Befriending a kid like Morris would cross strictly-adhered-to social lines and ding her reputation, but she does so anyway. Sort of. And thus an awkward, imperfectly balanced relationship unfolds.
It sounds familiar, and in many ways it is—Morris From America draws from decades’ worth of indie and TV coming-of-age stories that encourage us to identify with the gawky outsider looking in. But what makes the film stand out among so many of its predecessors is that this gawky outsider is a black kid who must deal with the everyday annoyances of adolescence while simultaneously learning how to navigate a world that frequently “others” those who look like him on a purely superficial level. And with a language barrier to boot.
(Spoilers ahead.) In the most basic sense, Katrin is the self-absorbed bad girl who frequently brings the shy new kid into squeamishly uncomfortable situations for her own twisted amusement under the guise of blissful ignorance. Early into their very lopsided relationship she invites the eager (but still noticeably wary) Morris to a rave, corners him, and goes in for a kiss … before pulling away at the last second to squirt him with a toy water pistol, right below the belt. Everyone around them starts to laugh, as she flitters away and an utterly embarrassed Morris runs to the bathroom to try and unsuccessfully make the stain on his pants go away. Her flirtatious response when he confronts her later after the party: It was all a game! You were supposed to shoot me back, tee hee. It’s certainly not Carrie levels of bullying, but it’s impossible not to feel pangs of empathy toward the poor kid, who is the one who suffers in this loss in translation.
When you factor in the black-white dynamic, however, Katrin moves from universal narcissistic teen to a “Becky” in training. (Yes, that Becky—the one with the “good hair,” upholder of a very specific Western aesthetic ideal.) When her mother discovers the two of them alone in her bedroom one afternoon, bonding over their different music tastes, her immediate response is to defiantly tell her mother—knowing this will get a rise out of her—that he’s her boyfriend. (This comes moments after Katrin asks him if he’s well-endowed, because aren’t all black guys well-endowed?) Elsewhere, she remains silent when other kids bully him and hurl more pointed racialized comments his way. (One kid calls him “Kobe,” because don’t all black guys play basketball?) On the blog Very Smart Brothas, Damon Young describes “Becky” as “a certain type of privileged young white woman who exists in a state of racial obliviousness that shifts from intentionally clueless to intentionally condescending.” This, in a nutshell, is Katrin.
Except Katrin (Lina Keller) isn’t a woman, she’s a teenager—and Morris From America doesn’t render any of its characters, even her, so simplistically as to be definable in such strict terms. Despite acting years older than her age, Katrin does possess just a twinge of innocence and genuine, benign curiosity that a real Becky would never have. (Unlike the purely cruel youth center teacher who accuses Morris without cause after finding a loose joint on the premises—a valuable lesson in how, so often, black bodies are rarely allowed the benefit of the doubt.) And just as Morris is frequently subject to the fraught gaze of those around him while living in as white a city as Heidelberg—Curtis jokes that he and Morris are the “only two brothers” there—Morris, too, is helplessly curious about other people, whether staring at the girl of his dreams or watching random young ballet dancers through the window of the dance studio he passes by on his way home. The tension between puberty and adulthood is palpable.
Katrin doesn’t make Morris’ struggles to adjust any easier, but the paradox is that she does help him build up confidence in her own self-involved way: She invites him to tag along with her and her DJ boyfriend’s crew while they tour Germany (Morris still thinks he has a chance with her—he’s still a 13-year-old boy after all), and in a climactic scene, convinces the shy Morris to perform his own rap in front of a crowd, and for her. After that intense high, though, she leaves him stranded in a completely unfamiliar city, with no idea of how to get home. (This is, in part, because Morris lashes out when he finally realizes Katrin will never seriously view him in a romantic sense.) It’s a culmination of the isolation that’s weighed down on him since he first moved to Heidelberg, the ultimate proof that he will never quite fully belong here. But it also offers him the opportunity to bond with his dad over the lengths they’ve gone to impress the opposite sex, particularly as black men in a foreign, overwhelmingly white world.
Katrin writes him a letter, explaining that she’s left Heidelberg for good and will continue to tour with her boyfriend’s band, because, as she puts it, Morris made her realize that everyone back home were “German dickheads.” It’s hard to tell if Katrin has actually grown from her short experience of getting to know Morris—even the most innocent and pure cross-racial friendships sometimes grow apart with age, and in white adulthood, benign curiosity about nonwhite peers often morphs into willful ignorance of the social and cultural advantages they possess. But it’s absolutely clear that while Morris remains, comparatively, just a very inexperienced kid, by the end, he’s had to mature much more quickly in certain ways. In the real world, black kids are so often perceived by others to be older than they are and must learn this about themselves early on as a means of survival and coping. Morris From America renders that aspect of the black coming-of-age experience perfectly.
