A Thousand and One: In the Midst of Broken Bottles and Crushed Up Cans, by David Bax

With its romantic opening music (just a taste of what’s to come from Gary Gunn’s beautiful score) and montage of establishing shots of New York City–including the twin towers; this is 1994–A.V. Rockwell‘s astonishingly gentle and assured feature directorial debut, A Thousand and One, is intentionally misleading you as to what kind of movie it’s going to be. The “New York is another character in the movie” trope is so overdone that David Wain roasted marshmallows over its corpse in his hilarious rom-com spoof They Came Together. So don’t let the Wu-Tang needle drops fool you. This is no rosy nostalgia love letter. Rockwell is smarter than that and she knows exactly what she’s doing.

As we are reminded via occasional glimpses of new reports and television appearances, it is Rudy Giuliani’s New York City into which Inez (Teyana Taylor) is released from prison. The mayor’s plan to improve the city on a surface level by cracking down on minor crimes hovers in the background while Inez kidnaps her son, Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), from a Brooklyn foster home, relocates him to another borough and forges his birth certificate and social security card.

But her plan works for years on end. She and Terry, played now by Aven Courtney after a jump forward in time, are surviving undetected. Terry is even doing well in school. But they now live in the New York City of Michael Bloomberg and the post-9/11 (an event A Thousand and One never directly references) erosion of civil liberties exemplified by the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy that was found to overwhelmingly target New Yorkers of color is overshadowed by another hallmark of the time, housing affordability. Rents in the city skyrocketed under Bloomberg, a sign of ongoing gentrification, especially of Harlem, where Inez and Terry have settled but are now being pressured to leave by an unscrupulous new landlord.

These changes in New York City aren’t quite as foregrounded as I’ve made them so far in this review. But they are crucial to understanding of Rockwell’s portrait of Inez’s life not as some opera of misery but as a struggle against the accumulation of banal indignities. Still, she proves herself a sly and intriguing storyteller, allowing the mystery of Inez and Terry’s life before we met them to quietly cultivate suspense in the background.

Rockwell is aided in forging depth in her characters by the great actors bringing them to life Adetola, Courtney and, eventually, Josiah Cross in the picture’s final stretch, all imbue Terry with brains, vulnerability and promise. But it’s Taylor who keeps her hands on the steering wheel. She’s a musician by trade and, though this isn’t her acting debut, it feels like a kind of coming out for her nonetheless.

A Thousand and One is often a quiet film, even in its scenes of strife and devastation of both the emotional and financial varieties. But in just under two hours, Rockwell has confidently, masterfully illustrated the ways in which everything–from huge cities to the minute individuals who fill them–changes only bit by bit. It’s only in looking back that we realize just how massive have been our gains and losses.