IN this fictionalised documentary that is young writer-director Ryan Coogler’s first feature, Michael B Jordan plays Oscar Grant who, less than a hour into the year 2009, fell to a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop’s bullet and died a few hours later in hospital.

Oscar was no saint. He’d done time. He was not a good employment prospect. Coogler‘s film begins at dawn on New Year’s Eve when he and Sophina (Melonie Diaz), the mother of four-year-old Tatiana, are enjoying intimacy in their bedroom in the apartment of his mother Wanda (Octavia Spenser, also one of the film’s producers).

Oscar’s intentions were as good as they might be in the circumstances. The film follows his day to joining his buddies and Sophina to celebrate. Wanda urges him to take the train rather than risk driving in traffic.

The gently political film leaves it to closing subtitles to explain events following Oscar’s death – riots, the light sentence imposed after a trial decided that the officer’s defence of mistaking his black, heavy, Glock pistol for his bright yellow Taser was not unreasonable.

Many may conclude that Coogler’s film hasn’t crossed the Pacific comfortably. It is cinema verité unlikely to leave an enduring legacy among Australian audiences living under different ethnicity pressures from those permeating working-class America where injustice’s shadow constantly hovers over non-whites.

 At Palace Electric