In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.
In March, Sean Baker broke an Academy Award record with Anora, being the first person to win four separate Oscars for the same film. He achieved this not just through Anora‘s excellence (though the ridiculous romp of sex workers, New Yawkers, and Russian henchmen is excellent), but by maintaining the DIY spirit that’s fueled 25 years of his features. He served not only as writer, director, and editor on all his films, but on three, including 2008’s Prince Of Broadway—which joined the Criterion Collection in April alongside Anora—Baker was also the handheld cinematographer. This indie auteurism lends itself to a focused vision, to through-lines that sustain across decades. Prince Of Broadway, like Anora, is an NYC fable, a storybook narrative whose plot twists seem to be happening to real people Baker pulled off the street. Rather than a struggling worker finding out a magical promise is too good to be true, though, the situation is reversed, and a struggling worker finds out that a blindsiding burden might actually save his life.
Shot with a shaky vitality and run through with Baker’s neorealist mix of discomfort and amusement, Prince Of Broadway finds complexity in its fringe subculture. Lucky (Prince Adu) is a hustler, pacing along Broadway in the wholesale district hawking knock-off Jordans and Guccis for Levon (Karren Karagulian, the permanent Baker fixture who was hilarious as Anora‘s Toros), who keeps the goods in the hidden back room of his sparse storefront. Like sex work, Lucky’s job is a customer-facing business, full of assurances and flattery and solicitations. Prince isn’t a con man per se, but he’s got to sell confidence; his authenticity must be verified before he can dole out “Adidas” with four stripes. Working the street, wheedling his way past people’s guards while keeping his head on a swivel for cops, requires that he meets expectations. Even if the middle-aged tourists and teenaged hagglers make a show of their suspicions, they’re looking for thrills alongside the deals.
These expectations are subverted when Lucky—in the middle of a potential sale—gets a toddler thrust upon him by an ex (Kat Sanchez) he hasn’t seen in years. Now a single father (allegedly), Lucky must adapt to parenthood while adapting his profession around his extremely cute, completely unhelpful new coworker. Yes, he has another unexpected mouth to feed, but the more sharp insight is that nobody, not his gray market regulars nor random law-abiding marks, wants to buy “designer” goods from Mr. Mom. Prince Of Broadway is far more grounded than that, of course, focusing less on Lucky’s comically inept dynamic with his son and more on how this responsibility is just one more occasion that this man living on the edge of poverty must rise to. Adjusting his image to his new role, or vice versa, is just one more job requirement.
The story of Black fatherhood that unfolds, one of opting in and growing up—of spending a roll of cash on strollers, toys, and tiny Nikes rather than blunts and beer—is endearingly bumpy and nowhere near as moralizing as the conservative refrain of “be a man” shouted at Lucky by old flames and their new lovers. The script is more akin to the quiet support given by Levon, whose friendship possesses the aspirational quality of a big brother wanting to atone for his own mistakes. Levon quickly takes to the child, envious of the stabilizing responsibility as his profession comes under constant legal scrutiny and his personal life crumbles.
Lucky’s journey contrasts with Levon’s more prickly examination of masculinity’s pitfalls. When not around his male-driven job, Karagulian—young and macho and channeling Dan Hedaya—tightens up into slimy insecurity. The jealous man’s young wife (Victoria Tate) is in the middle of fleeing their large-yet-tacky apartment. Lucky’s girlfriend (Keyali Mayaga) at least tolerates his well-meaning floor-mattress juvenilia, though before accepting his son, he too seems to be in danger of embracing Levon’s brand of sexist entitlement. Adu (a non-professional actor who was working as a security guard at the time) gives a similarly assured performance to Karagulian, on an opposite trajectory. He lowers his hard-edged work facade and embraces his new role, as demeaning and deflating as it sometimes is. His son is, at the end of the day, a better motivator than his own self-interest. Levon doesn’t have much to fight for, outside of his paternal friendship with Lucky. But whether endearingly fed up and swearing at his kid or staring at him with aching, confused love in his welled-up eyes, Adu is always projecting Lucky’s interior growth.
Lucky is growing out of a place that won’t exist for much longer. He and his colleagues march down frigid streets jam-packed with specialty retailers, of beauty products, of kiddie clothes, of perfume. Immigrant-driven small businesses, embodied by the Ghanaian Lucky and the Armenian-Lebanese Levon, that were still clinging to life in 2008—entrenched in corners and cubbyholes that they’ve been forced from in the decade-and-a-half of gentrification since. Baker captures these locations with a cramped frame and a caring eye, often emphasizing their size and silliness by shooting from the child’s perspective. It’s a charming stylistic choice that helps sell much of the film’s comedy, but also gives Prince Of Broadway an aesthetic twist more immersive than the mock-doc zooms and the camera operator’s frantic footwork.
Similarly enveloping is the economic reality of this world. Even as Lucky becomes a contented family man, and as Levon continues forging forward in a cycle that’s eating him alive, their relationships are flotsam they cling to as capitalism’s raging river rushes them towards the next hustle. Just as Anora‘s heroine finds herself back at square one after her whirlwind adventure—with a few more stories and a few more emotional scars—these men resume their duties, weathering life-changing events that still couldn’t overcome the factors that stuck them in these ruts in the first place. Fairy-tale ending or not, life goes on.
