Sollers Point dramatizes many of the most poignant social issues plaguing the United States today, particularly systemic racism, urban decay and misogyny. In several ways, it posits an argument explaining the rise of the nihilistic and white supremacist Trump movement that has seized the ever-growing tide of social frustration and economic discontentment bubbling up across the country. The overlapping destruction wrought by the War on Drugs, the prison-industrial complex and the demonization of organized labor create the foundation of Sollers Point’s narrative.
The protagonist of the film is Keith (McCaul Lombardi), a man just finishing a long stint on house arrest, which came after a prison sentence, in the Sollers Point neighborhood of Baltimore. He lives in his childhood home with his father Carol (Jim Belushi), a former steel worker who never left what has become the Rust Belt. The neighborhood, with its interstate overpasses, empty warehouses and racially-segregated social spaces, is as much a character in the film as are any of the people.
Early on, the film portrays Keith as a man beaten back by bureaucratic barriers and systemic injustices, the sorts of obstacles that keep ex-cons at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and promote recidivism among parolees. Keith does not want to be another statistic, released from prison for a brief interlude before returning, yet it seems inevitable that he will fall back into whatever got him into trouble in the first place.
But, crucially, Keith is also white. Director/co-writer Matthew Porterfield takes care to demonstrate the privileges that Keith has inherited that give him a sliver of hope for rising out of the morass of his former criminality. He has stable shelter, easy internet access, a free car given to him by his sister and deep connections in his local community dating back to his father’s work life in the steel mill. Not to mention his white skin and male gender identity. Maybe he really can beat the trends and become the rare formerly-incarcerated success story.
With this set-up, Sollers Point traces Keith’s efforts to find a job and enroll in an adult education program. He is hounded by a skinhead gang that he collaborated with in prison to make his time inside more bearable, and they become increasingly disappointed by his reluctance to join them now that he is free. Instead, he pushes drugs for an aspiring rapper who lives a few doors down. He squanders his opportunity to take a vocational course because he visits a prostitute rather than show up on time. He harasses his ex-girlfriend, ignores his father and does very little to help himself. He is prone to violent outbursts and ill-conceived plots of revenge and menace.
As the film progresses, Keith becomes less a victim of the impersonal and institutionalized violence of post-Nixon, post-Reagan and post-Clinton life in the US and more a self-saboteur who cannot recognize the multiple fortunate chances he has to improve his lot. He is petulant, juvenile and rash. He is hard to like. In spite of all this – and even taking into account his many privileges – Porterfield’s direction leaves no doubt that Keith faces incredible odds. His particular corner of Baltimore has few jobs and US society is not kind to convicted felons.
It is people like Keith – white, male, frustrated, repeatedly humiliated by society and neither informed nor patient enough to fully understand what is going on – who have responded to their declining living standards and social status by supporting increasingly reactionary sociopolitical movements. Keith consistently resists the skinheads, but his growing sense of powerlessness is palpable, as is his capacity for mindless destructive force. Sollers Point, in this sense, makes a nice fictional complement to Roberto Minervini’s 2015 documentary The Other Side.
In the end, Sollers Point is a case study proving the sociological thesis that people like Keith are in their situation partially because of systemic issues and partially due to personal ones. In other words, Keith deserves some of the blame for his situation, but almost anyone thrust into his particular life context would have also failed because structural issues of US society make success so unlikely.
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