Our America

Our America is the story of LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman two inner-city Chicago teenagers who eloquently distilled their lives on the Mean Streets into an award-winning Public Radio documentary (and later, a book) titled Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago. When a local NPR ...more

Early on, Our America seems headed toward depicting misery in the projects at arm's length -- possibly making it guilty of the same "ghetto tourism" NPR journalist David Isay (Josh Charles) gets accused of during the story. There's token grit and danger, but the viewer senses the filmmakers might softball it by characterizing the two leads as saints, rather than flawed byproducts of their environment. Then, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman participate in a game of "knockout," dropping bricks onto ...more