Movie Nation

An infamous police shooting leads to trials and a search for justice that doesn’t end in a courtroom in “Aftershock” The Nicole P. Bell Story.” It’s a sturdy, often moving fil built aroud Rayven Symone Ferrell’s affecting performance in the title role.

Years before Trayvon Martin, over a decade before George Floyd, Michael Brown and others, before “Black Lives Matter” became a national movement thanks to rampant, consequence-free police violence against Black men, a young man was killed in a hail of police gunfire in Queens, New York.

Sean Bell was 23, out celebrating with friends the night before his wedding when unidentified undercover officers emptied their weapons into him and the car he was driving friends home from a night club. Some of New York’s finest even reloaded their pistols and emptied them again.

There were child seats in the car, and fellow celebrants. But there were no guns and no warrants, just a cascading series of errors exposing ignored police “protocols” and alcohol impaired deicision making by officers whose shoot-first-rationalize-later defense was “I feared for my life.”

“Aftershock” takes us through the all-too-familiar “demonize the victim” news cycle as it was experienced by the woman Bell was set to marry, the mother of his two little girls. The film humanizes the victim and points its damning finger at a system more interested in protecting unionized police behaving badly than in keeping the peace and delivering justice.

We meet Nicole Paultre as a sixteen year-old whose crush on tall high school baseball star, Sean (Bentley Green) is requited, it turns out. She gushes, they chat, and when he asks her out, her sister notices her antic primping.

“Why’re you getting all cute?”

“My future husband,” Nicole declares!

Six years later, they’ve got a little girl and another newly born. It’s November of 2006, and Sean — catnip to the ladies, it is implied — is being cagey about something. Is he coming home late because he’s cheating? Nope. He’s been secretly planning their wedding.

But when Nicole’s small bridal shower breaks up, she gets alarming news. Something’s happened. Sean’s in the hospital.

“Afterschock” vividly recreates the indignities and outrages of this wee hours dash to the hospital. Nurses are evasive. The surgeon who’s “been working on Sean” is told not to talk to her. The cop who insists he can fill her in takes her name, hears the phrase “wife” and spits out “You mean ‘wife’ or wifey?'”

The police are “managing” this tragedy and circling the wagons. The only thing the medical establishment wants to establish is whether or not Sean’s an organ “donor.” That’s before anybody will admit Sean’s dead, much less the circumstances of his death. Nicole seeing his body is out of the question.

It’s only when Rev. Al Sharpton (Richard Lawson) expresses his condolences that Nicole sees a way to fight a “system” that is steamrolling her and the surviving victims thanks to police leaks, police spin and a court system setting the table for a “fix.”

Lawson, a veteran character actor whose credits go back to the original “Poltergeist” and Walter Hill’s underworld musical “Streets of Fire,” gives us an eye-opening rethinking of “Reverend Al,” already a public figure and TV fixture when these events happened.

This is a Reverend Al who promises to help “make sure nothing is covered up” and that the “people responsible are held accountable.” He will help arrange a lawyer (William DePaolo), give advice and arrange an appearance on “Larry King Live” to help her get the true innocent young man “shot down on his wedding night” in “a hail of bullets” story out there.

The only hint of the self-caricatured, attention-hungry opportunist Rev. Al that Sharpton has allowed to be his image is when he notes the importance of this case — “the biggest thing since Amadou Diallo.”

Ferrell, of “The Hate You Give” and “Through Her Eyes,” ably gets across Nicole transforming into the woman she needs to be, finding her voice to speak out before the eventual trial of the officers involved, and beyond. It’s a somber, sober-minded performance, showing us a young mom growing into someone not to be underestimated.

Director and co-writer Alesia Glidewell’s film started life as a planned web TV series, according to the Internet Movie Database, which has been Glidewell’s medium of choice. So the production values are good, but not major-studio-feature polished. The same is true of the casting, which has a few standouts (Richard T. Jones as the attorney defending the cops) among the parade of lesser-known talents given roles.

The narrative changes points of view a couple of times — we see the police getting their stories straight, protesting their innocence, with a commanding officer or two seemingly recognizing the right-and-wrong of the situation. Will they treat their fellow officers accordingly?

You don’t have to remember how this case played out and its place within the “Black Lives Matter” prehistory to be both outraged and moved by the story told here, and unsettled by the fear that “not much has changed” since.

This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.

Rating: R, violence, some profanity

Cast: Rayven Symone Ferrell, Bentley Green, Richard Lawson, Richard T Jones, William DePaolo, Byron Kenneth Brown Jr. and Kevin Jackson

Credits: Directed by Alesia Glidewell, scripted by Alesia Glidewell and Cas Sigers-Beedle. A Faith Media release.

Running time: 1:48