Blood Done Sign My Name

A movie based on a real-life event as riveting and history-rich as the Oxford, N.C. trial of Henry “Dickie” Marrow’s murder can’t be anything but worth watching. Unfortunately, there’s still the matter of craft, and it is in this area that Blood Done Sign My Name often comes up short.

Based on Duke professor Tim Tyson’s autobiographical work of the same name, Blood Done Sign My Name depicts the local climate during Vernon Tyson’s tenure as pastor of Oxford United Methodist Church in the early ’70s. Although framed by the beginning and ultimate termination of Tyson’s pastorship, the film’s core is the civil rights movement’s  response to Vietnam vet Marrow’s beating and murder.

Local teacher Ben Chavis (Nate Parker) and famed “stoker” Golden Frinks (Afemo Omilami) lead the town’s black citizens in protest, and the two actors also provide the film’s best performances. Blood’s strength lies in its stirring, emotional plot, which lends itself perfectly to a filmic representation. Other than its scattershot beginning, the movie is paced well and keeps the stakes high throughout. The dominant viewing emotion is the constant desire to see what happens next.

The problems arise in writer-director Jeb Stuart’s adapting of Blood into cinema. The effective movement within and between scenes is sometimes offset by over-the-top montages, particularly a display of the family’s activities that belongs on the cutting room floor of a Lifetime original. Compared with the capable depictions of the trial and a haunting Klan ritual, missteps like the montage seem like the work of a different filmmaker. And the dialogue, which likely works better in book form, is often hackneyed and laughably cliche.

Even considering these flaws, however, this tale deserves an audience in any medium. Hopefully, this movie finds one.