Showing posts with label young soul rebels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label young soul rebels. Show all posts

Sunday, July 16, 2023

#MovieTime - Young Soul Rebels (1991)


Young Soul Rebels (1991)
Set in London in 1977, Young Soul Rebels focuses on a pirate radio station run by the Black, openly gay Caz and his half-white, half-Black, straight best friend Chris, who illegally bring soul and R&B hits to the masses. 

Set during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and inspired by luminary queer director Isaac Julien’s days as a soul boy himself, the genre-blurring movie is part murder mystery, part queer romance, and part musical love letter to a period in British history when Black style was developing its own unmistakable identity. 

In a sharp, giallo-style opening, Caz’s friend is killed while cruising a local park, kicking off a plot that introduces probing questions that disrupt the duo’s lives and persist today: Can you rely on police accountability when queer people are murdered? How do marginalized communities acknowledge and protect their own who inhabit multiple vulnerable identities at once? 

Julien gracefully handles these and other issues, adding further depth through Caz’s romance with white punk socialist Billibud, which underscores racist and homophobic tendencies in the era’s punk scene. 

A countercultural gut punch with gorgeous visual style and an unimpeachable soundtrack spanning the O’Jays and the Blackbyrds to Sylvester and X-Ray Spex, Young Soul Rebels is as electrifyingly relevant now as it was in 1991