‘Love, Brooklyn’ review: Vivid, imperfect love letter to a borough

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

First-time feature director Rachael Abigail Holder’s cinematic postcard to loss and mutability is an attractive tableau of aged brownstones and new hot spots, canopied streets and hilly parks. It’s also well-anchored to what producer-star André Holland — playing a blocked writer named Roger juggling relationships with two strong women — does best: a charismatic, deer-in-headlights sadness. But the movie stays in that postcard allure, never quite edging its earnest expressions of desire and anxiety into anything more stakes-driven or detailed, the way a love letter might rattle and console simultaneously.

First seen cycling his city’s streets day and night with a becalmed sense of ownership, Holland’s Roger is a die-hard Brooklynite none too happy with the smoothing over of his cherished neighborhoods by “obscene” money. It’s a topic that animates him over a boozy, chatty candlelit dinner with gallery owner Casey (the luminescent Nicole Beharie), herself wrestling with the future of a struggling business that’s been in her family for generations. Friendly exes, Roger and Casey have a teasing rapport. They’re also perhaps not entirely over each other.

Roger’s indignation over gentrification isn’t enough, however, to motivate him to meet a deadline on what he now considers a disingenuous, assigned piece on the “evolving” Brooklyn. He’d rather answer the nightly call of weed-enhanced intimacy with massage therapist Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a recently widowed single mom. Frank and playful, she likes their casual arrangement and doesn’t mind her inquisitive daughter (Cadence Reese) knowing mommy has a new friend, but between the lines, Nicole also hints to Roger there’s a chance to deepen things.

Written by Paul Zimmerman, “Love, Brooklyn” is the type of triangle in which everyone’s job thematically aligns (a tad neatly) with all the talk of whether to look back or move on. Selling art sits at the nexus of old techniques and affluent new tastes; masseuses expose pressure points; and to write is to try (and try and try) to make sense of it all. Even Roger’s pal Alan (the dryly funny Roy Wood Jr.), a bored husband who lives vicariously through his friend’s romantic entanglements, echoes the story’s emphasis on which-way-to-go paralysis. He also has one of the script’s better lines about Roger’s indecision regarding Nicole and Casey: “‘All of the above’ is not an answer.”

But where Holder’s sensitive, location-rich direction leaves room for the kind of honest, orienting drama we crave from this scenario, the screenplay is ultimately too bland and nonspecific about its characters’ lives to keep us engaged. It’s as if the movie were trapped in a limbo between the slick universality of a Netflix romcom and a bone-deep micro-indie with all the smarts and feels.

It’s left to the cast to do the best sales job with this underdeveloped material. Holland, on the heels of his stellar turn in the underappreciated character study “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” can make you forget how little we know of Roger’s background, so magnetic is his prickly, awkward emotional confusion. He has incredible scene partners too in Beharie and Wise, who exude an enviable maturity navigating their characters’ feelings about Roger, compartmentalizing their hurt in a way that, when it rises to the surface, feels suitably poignant. They’re a captivating trio that one wishes had been given more challenging connective tissue than the loose narrative grid of “Love, Brooklyn.”