Placed into Sundance's NEXT category, Cronies chronicles 24 hours in the lives of three friends in St. Louis. Shot almost entirely in black and white, it is the directorial debut of Michael Larnell, a student of Spike Lee's course at the NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Lee serves as executive producer on the film that was also written, edited, and produced by Larnell.
Cronies follows Louis (George Sample III), a young black man with a girlfriend and daughter working hard to provide for his family. His childhood best friend Jack (Zurich Buckner), is still on the streets and a bit aimless. When new friend Andrew (Brian Kowalski), a white coworker who shares Louis's love of weed, meets Jack, tensions are high. Above all, Cronies is about male friendship and how Louis has one foot in each world.
That said, Cronies comes across as aimless as its characters. Restricted to 24 hours, Larnell inserts interviews with each character to provide their backstory and motivations. The problem is that those interviews tell us things about Louis, Jack, and Andrew without showing us. Louis cares about his family but we watch him spend all day smoking weed and goofing off. Although they're supposed to be different from one another, both Andrew and Jack spend the day with Louis goofing off, doing drugs, partying and being reckless.
While the film centers on Louis, Jack is by far the most interesting of the trio. We get to see him with his mother who has been addicted to painkillers since a bad car accident left her with numerous injuries. We see him go from the cocky show-off who never takes off his sunglasses to an insecure young man full of self-doubt and remorse.
The film's strengths center on its interesting characters, although they were never fully developed. The most interesting, was the character of St. Louis, a city not usually seen on screen, but Larnell effectively gave St. Louis a voice. However at the end of the day, the immediacy of the film is lost to rambling interviews and aimless wandering.
