), a talented young artist tormented by the recent death of his disabled little brother. Kadir runs with a graffiti crew called Outside the Lines, headed up by the dangerous but charismatic Skemes , and he’s desperate to prove himself to the older guy. Which is how he comes to pull a gun on a random stranger at the Story Avenue transit stop one night.
In events evidently inspired by a true story, Kadir picks on Luis , a Puerto Rican MTA conductor, who is not at all intimidated by the younger man . Instead, he takes Kadir to a Cuban cafe to have dinner with him, eventually buying the gun from him, not knowing that it actually belongs to Skemes. Just as Kadir is missing a father figure, Luiz is missing a son, and his fight to win the boy’s trust becomes a tug of war when Skemes gets to hear about it.
Though the predicament it sets out is schematic at time, the performances are not. Guzmán, grizzled and dependable as ever but never saintly, is perhaps one of the few actors who can pull off this kind of part, but Blackk is the revelation here, credibly evoking a lost soul at a crossroads whose destiny could take him all the way in either direction .