Obviously I’m not American, but even I heard about the shooting of Oscar Grant by the BART Police in Oakland, California in 2009. I was a regular of the Quarter to Three forum at that time and I remember forum regulars who are Bay Area residents being abuzz over the incident. The incident resulted in Grant’s death and triggered huge protests and riots due to how widely amateur videos filmed using mobile telephones and personal cameras were disseminated online.

Fruitvale Station then is a fictionalized account of the last 24 hours of Grant’s life made by a first-time director, Ryan Coogler. On the whole it is a rather unremarkable day as we follow Grant as he goes about his daily routine, taking his daughter to pre-school and his Latina girlfriend to work, buying shrimp for his mother’s birthday dinner later that night and so on. The authenticity and mundaneness of Grant’s home life actually makes these scenes engrossing, an intimate view of the lives of black Americans that we don’t see very often.

Unfortunately Coogler goes out of his way to depict Grant as a fundamentally good man in order to reinforce the injustice of what happened to him. True, he isn’t without his flaws: he has done a stint in jail, cheated on his girlfriend and apparently lost his job because he didn’t take the responsibility seriously enough. But Cooger is careful to ensure that the weaker sides of Grant are talked about but not shown to audiences on-screen. What we do see is Grant helping strangers, doting on his daughter, resolving to make an honest living and so on. Coogler even resorts to a fabricated pet-the-dog scene to ram home what a decent guy Grant is.

This overt bias pretty much ruins any sympathy I may have for the director’s motives and makes me suspicious of how many of the too perfect to be true details in here are fake. Coogler even cast Kevin Durand, who has made a career out of playing villains, as the BART police officer who bullies Grant and his friends, which is plain lazy film-making. Grant’s almost saintly pose in the film poster shown here is more evidence of how ham-fistedly the film is trying to drive the narrative in a single direction.

To be fair, there are a lot of other things to like in this film. Michael B. Jordan performance fits the role like a glove and Coogler shows a remarkable amount of talent in many lesser details. In one scene on the BART train, we see a black man with a hood and a heavy coat and we’re led to think he may be up to no good. Then he flips open his coat, pulls out a pair of speakers and everyone starts partying to his tunes. That’s as good a statement on racial stereotypes as any without needing to be attention-grabbing.

Grant’s story does deserve to be told but the truth is that what happened to him was a gross injustice regardless of whether or not he was a good man. Fruitvale Station would have been a much stronger film if the director had been more willing to trust in that fundamental principle. A decent effort by a first-time director but it can be done better.