Love, Brooklyn trailer offers classic writerly romance in New York

Love, Brooklyn follows Holland as he “navigates complicated relationships with his ex, an art gallery owner (Nicole Beharie), and his current lover, a newly-single mother (DeWanda Wise), with the support of his best friend (Roy Wood Jr.),” according to the film’s synopsis. Speaking with IndieWire, Holder said the script, written by Paul Zimmerman, wasn’t initially written with Black actors in mind. The characters’ “culture wasn’t defined, so I could fill in the paint in that way,” she said. “A script originally written for white characters needed a culture to be infused into to it, so it wasn’t really a challenge, it was an exciting venture to choose what that culture would be. We didn’t just want the characters to be Black period. Blackness is a wide scope of people, and I wanted them to be specific.”

The movie initially premiered at Sundance, where The A.V. Club‘s Jacob Oller observed that “Beharie and Wise are excellent at carving out small details of a dynamic that’s more complex that it seems on the surface, but in a larger narrative sense, everyone’s making the most out of a thin script.” He added, “It ends up like every other three-person romantic dramedy ends up, but at least Love, Brooklyn boasts competent players going through its motions.”