Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Jamesy Boy Blu-ray Movie Review

Invisible Walls

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 21, 2014

Jamesy Boy is the semi-fictionalized biography of James Burns, a 25-year-old "graduate" of the American penal system who makes a cameo appearance near the end of the film. A habitual passenger in the revolving door of institutional confinement since he was a child, Burns graduated to an adult facility after finding a surrogate father in a local gang lord. According to every statistic, he should have either died young or remained a long-term resident of one correctional facility or another, but Burns has so far proved an exception. The film chronicles his spiritual awakening and his ultimate decision to straighten out and start over.

An independent production, Jamesy Boy is the feature debut of director Trevor White from a screenplay by White and Lane Shadgett. White's brother, Tim, is a producer. Already at a tender age, White had accumulated a wealth of practical experience. His mother worked for CBS News and ran summer film camps for kids from their native Annapolis, Maryland. White made short films with a video camera as a teenager and majored in filmmaking at Cornell. On the set of Jamesy Boy, co-star James Woods, who has seen more than his share of major directors at work, could not believe that this was White's first feature.

The combination of White's confidence and the appeal of Burns's story attracted an impressive cast for such a low-budget feature. In addition to Woods, Mary-Louise Parker agreed to play his mother, Tracy Burns, a well-meaning parent hopelessly overmatched by the forces pulling her son into a life of crime. Taissa Farmiga (American Horror Story) appears as a "nice" girl who represents an alternate possibility in Burns's life. And the great Ving Rhames brings his uniquely stoic presence to the pivotal role of a lifer who gives Burns a grim preview of his dead-end future, unless he gets off the conveyor belt carrying him forward.

Jamesy Boy unfolds in two separate time periods, and one of the challenges for newcomer Spencer Lofranco, who plays James, is to distinguish between the teenage James in the earlier period and the twenty-something James in the later years. Hair, makeup and wardrobe do some of the work, but the difficulty is attitude, because the character himself barely changes for a very long time. One of the film's themes is that the attitudes that keep leading someone like James back to prison are set in boyhood and, in most cases, never change.

In the earlier story, James is living at home with his mother (Parker) and younger sister (Kellyn Rogers), with an ankle bracelet monitoring his movements, a remnant of his latest juvenile infraction. The local public school won't accept him because of his record, and James is incensed that his mother has to hire a lawyer to get him into an educational institution that is supposed to be open to all. He concludes, not unreasonably, that society has already thrown him away. It's only a matter of time before he succumbs to the temptation to slit the monitor from his ankle and take off.

The temptress who lures him is named Crystal (Rosa Salazar), and she introduces James to a gang leader, Roc (Michael Trotter), whose business is primarily robbery and drugs. With Roc and his crew, the fourteen-year-old James, shortly dubbed "Jamesy Boy", finds a surrogate family offering love and acceptance, especially when he proves his value as a backup man on a holdup. Sex, drugs and cash follow in short order. This is the life!

Or is it? James has enough of a sense that something is missing to be attracted to Sarah (Farmiga), the local girl who works at her father's convenience store and has grown wise beyond her years from watching the world pass in front of her counter. Sarah isn't frightened by James, and she sees something decent beneath the bravado. As James spends more time away from Roc's crew, Crystal grows jealous, which adds a toxic element to an already volatile mix of testosterone, greed and rivalry. Arguments erupt; scores go wrong; eventually, arrests are made.

Jamesy Boy's later storyline begins with James's arrival at his first adult prison after years spent in juvenile facilities. He gets into a fight as soon as he arrives, attracting the ire of Lt. Falton (Woods), who is in charge of the cell block. Then James squares off with the leader of a Latino gang, Guillermo (Taboo), in defense of another new arrival, a first-time offender sentenced for a non-violent crime named Chris (Ben Rosenfield), who is afraid and therefore an obvious target. James's efforts to defend Chris, and the punishments those efforts bring upon him at the hands of the unrelenting Falton, become a defining moment in his evolution.

But James needs perspective on what he is experiencing, and that element is supplied through an oddly antagonistic friendship with Conrad (Ving Rhames), a solitary prisoner who is always reading and of whom everyone is terrified, because of his record of multiple homicides. With the same indifference to consequences that landed him in prison, James keeps approaching Conrad with questions about his reading until finally the older man relents and answers a few questions. It is Conrad to whom James eventually shows his nascent attempts at writing poetry, and it is ultimately Conrad who, having seen too many young men come and go and return, finally shoves James into a parole hearing that James assumes is a pointless exercise.

Jamesy Boy's themes about the allure of criminal life and the dehumanization of incarceration are well-worn, but the film is distinguished by nuanced performances that bring unexpected vitality to familiar moments. Woods is especially fine at conveying the inner tension of an experienced CO who is frequently torn between a genuine desire to help an inmate with the potential to be reclaimed and a duty to serve the system that protects the men under his command. Rhames manages, with the slightest of gestures, to convey the struggle between the resignation that lets Conrad get through each day and the sudden surge of hope when he sees someone he actually might be able to help. Taissa Farmiga and Mary-Louise Parker, each in her own way, show depths of emotion without sentimentality.

If there is a weakness in Jamesy Boy, it is the central character, and the issue is inherent in the story, although I suspect the temptation for many viewers will be to blame actor Spencer Lofranco, who is simply delivering what the script requires. With a few exceptions, much of the action of Jamesy Boy requires James to be a bystander and observer. No matter how much swagger and tough talk he brandishes, most of the extreme criminal activity in the film is perpetrated by others. James is affected by what he sees, but the film depicts violence as something he struggles with internally rather than acting out. (When he does occasionally get violent, it happens mostly off-camera.) Whether this reflects James Burns's actual experience or his influence as a co-producer—or, just possibly, an inability on the part of all involved to face up to the full truth of Burns's past—the soft-peddling of James as a danger to other people robs his great awakening of its full dramatic impact. In the climactic scene where he addresses the parole board, he speaks of living with what he's done for the rest of his life, but what we've actually seen isn't all that terrible. We've seen worse reflected in the ravaged face of Lt. Felton and the behavior of Conrad, Roc, Guillermo—and a few who didn't make it.

Jamesy Boy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shot with the Arri Alexa by cinematographer Robert Lam, who is branching out after various crew positions in TV, Jamesy Boy comes to Blu-ray in a 1080p, AVC-encoded presentation that reflects the usual strengths of a digitally acquired project with no intervening analog conversion: sharp images, crisp detail, an absence of video noise and a precisely calibrated color palette courtesy of a post-production on a digital intermediate. The prison sequences (shot at a now-closed facility near Baltimore) have been given a chill, sterile look, as if the facility were newly constructed by some private corporation to which the local authorities have outsourced their penal needs. (The location is never specified, although the real James Burns is from Denver.) The scenes from James's gang life were shot in and around Baltimore, and the colors are bland and nondescript, in an obvious attempt to suggest any of numerous possible environments where the economy has stalled.

XLrator Media has clearly tried to economize by using a BD-25. The average bitrate of 20.02 Mbps is perfectly adequate for digitally acquired footage and is probably preferable to overcompression to accommodate a lossless audio track, given the limited nature of the soundtrack (see below).

Jamesy Boy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Two audio tracks are available, English and French, both in Dolby Digital 5.1 at the standard DVD rate of 448 kbps. Blu-ray fans have reasonably come to expect lossless audio as standard, but in this instance, it may not matter much. The sound mix for Jamesy Boy isn't elaborate, even in the occasional "big" scene such as a deal that goes wrong and ends in a shootout. The track is dominated by dialogue, which is clear; general ambiance; and a bass-heavy rap-inflected score and soundtrack written and mostly performed by Jermaine Stegall (Breathless). Lossless encoding might give it more shine, but the track certainly achieves its effect in DD.

Jamesy Boy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Director's Commentary: Trevor White divides his commentary between an appreciation of his actors, descriptions of the logistics of shooting and comments on the nuances of key scenes and performances. Notably absent, almost as if the subject were off limits, is any discussion of the script's development or ways in which the film's story departed from the life of James Burns. White does talk about Burns's career subsequent to his release from prison, and his admiration for his protagonist is obvious.



• Interviews (1080p; 1.78:1): Woods is by far the most articulate and interesting, with Parker a close second. With Rhames, one gets the sense that he could say a lot but has chosen not to.
• James Woods (7:33)
• Mary-Louise Parker (3:27)
• Ving Rhames (1:15)
• Spencer Lofranco (1:57)
• Taissa Farmiga (2:43)



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2.39:1; 1:37).



• Additional Trailers: At startup the disc plays trailers for Free Ride, Dark Tourist, Assault on Wall Street, Crave and The Baytown Outlaws, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Jamesy Boy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Jamesy Boy is a flawed but intriguing effort on a subject too important to ignore in a country with a huge prison population and an educational system struggling to cope. That the film reflects, however incompletely, an effort by someone who turned his life around to explain how he did so is enough to recommend it, and director White and his cast and crew bring enough craft and enthusiasm to ensure that viewers won't be bored. Whether they'll be enlightened is a different question. Except for the lack of lossless audio, the Blu-ray presentation can't be faulted. Recommended at least for a rental.