The Brother From Another Planet
Classic Cinema
•
1h 49m
Directed by John Sayles | 109 mins | 1984
New to Earth and fleeing bondage on his own planet, a mute telepath extraterrestrial known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton)—who has the outward appearance of a twentysomething African American male hits the streets of Harlem—gets a crash course in the baffling complexities of race and class politics in Reagan era America while trying to stay one step ahead of a pair of bounty hunters from back home played by David Strathairn and writer-director Sayles. A scrappy, endlessly inventive, and drily funny cultural assimilation allegory, with Morton’s wordless central performance invoking the great silent films of yore, and the nocturnal street photography of Ernest R. Dickerson capturing a radically altered ’80s Manhattan.
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