“Raise Your Hand” is an earnest, well-acted indie drama seriously undercut by coarseness, cliches and stereotypes.
Writer-director Jessica Rae’s debut feature is about coming of age and finding your voice. The stakes are pretty high for a high school story — escaping the trap of poverty, poor decisions made without smart adult advice and supervision and the role art and artistic expression can play in breaking a cycle that sees single moms raising single moms.
Jearnest Corchado plays Gia, our heroine/narrator, a teen who has written her life story in diaries since childhood, something that could prove a help when she takes a high school drama class where self-revealing monologues are required.
But showing up is also required in Ms. Ramsey’s (Jess Nurse) class. And Gia’s got a lot going on — some of which she trots out as excuses (working mom, part-time job, kid brother), and some of which we only hear her narrate as she’s scribbling fresh, unfiltered confessional entries into her journal.
Because Gia’s bestie Lila (Hanani Taylor) has it even rougher. Her dad’s been in prison since before she was born. Her single mom had issues that put her in the wrong alley at the wrong time.
If social services knew Lila was living at home alone, that she was cutting class and hooking up with any guy who smiles her way — even in the school toilets (with Gia standing guard) — Lila’s “freedom” to continue down the primrose path of bad choices would be yanked away.
Gia’s also distracted by the constant attention of boys. Latina Gia and Black Lila work this power with their wardrobe, their insolence with authority figures and their smoking. Yeah, those are stereotypes. Another and more unfortunate one in this ’90s period piece is how it leans into is its portrayal of Black teen boys and young Black men men as sexual predators.
There are no white kids at Jefferson High, and few white teachers, as well as a white campus cop and condescending white principal.
Teachers like Ms. Ramsey and vice principals like Amari Edmunds (Evan Allen-Gessesse) fight an uphill battle to “see” these kids, take an interest and try to steer them away from poor choices.
“Raise Your Hand” is about Gia’s talent for writing getting noticed and the struggle it takes for her to accept this and buy in to school before it’s too late. And it’s about the hyper-sexualized high school soap opera that engulfs Lila and Gia and threatens not just their relationship, but their safety.
High school gossip, hit-it-and-quit-it boys and young men, corrupt and bullying cops, tuned-out parents and racially patronizing administrators all have a place in this messy melodrama, a movie that pushes “school” and family into the background to make room for more cliched situations and stereotypical characters.
Gia is pretty much the only archetype (artsy but poor) allowed to have an “arc” to her story, which is myopic in the way it emphasizes sex and sexuality and sex crimes.
There’s little more to “school” life than sex and attempts to procure it, with one moment of respite as the kids in drama class find themselves inspired by or contemptuous of “Rent” — not that most public high schools wouldn’t avoid that edgy musical like the plague.
And you’d think a movie about a “great writer” in the making would have a pithy insight or two or at least one quotable line, even one laced with f-bombs.
You can do only so much in a 90 minute movie, and one gives the writer-director the benefit of the doubt about intentions. But “Raise Your Hand” is a perfunctory “journey” trapped in a genre picture vacuum, a “troubled teens in high school” melodrama built on a checklist of cliches.
It doesn’t move so much as manipulate. But all involved earn a “nice try,” and the reward of their 2020 movie finally being picked up for streaming. Better luck next time.
Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault, sexual situations, teen smoking, profanity
Cast: Jearnest Corchado, Hanani Taylor, Evan Allen-Gessesse and Jess Nurse
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jessica Rae. A Freestyle release.
Running time: 1:31
