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This is the story of three Lovett brothers, Elliot a/k/a Lil E (age 22), Marcus (20), and Denzell a/k/a Demo (14). All three are talented rappers and poets who unfortunately live in the ghetto of Miami known as Brown Sub. Elliot, who serves time in Iraq fighting the insurgency claims that it’s safer overseas and that he gets shot at less. The neighborhood gangs conduct a civil war of sorts as the young kids try to hone and promote their talents. Demo is even trying to get a major record interested in his music, but is this young boy’s real life rhyming too hardcore for the general public?

This is a great example of how a documentary can develop and evolve throughout the course of the production. I’m sure director George Gittoes walked into the ghetto (actually he had to be escorted in so no one stole his equipment) fully expecting to simply explore the lives of these three men, focusing on the soldier Elliot and working off the parallels between the Iraq War and Brown Sub. And that’s how it starts out. He gets them talking about it directly, and as if the verbal connection wasn’t enough, he also cuts back and forth between shots of the two struggles in order to really pound your head over and over about it including a weird, heavy handed ending shot of the wreckage of an Iraqi car. What’s probably the most fascinating part of the situation is that Elliot is seen as a coward for leaving and fighting someone else’s war. There’s a lot of Brown Sub pride. The people are interesting and I really enjoyed seeing these people interact with each other and with the old Australian documentary filmmaker behind the camera.

Eventually, however, the movie switches gears and it becomes a quest for Gittoes to promote young Demo and to try to get him a record deal. The second half of the picture is devoted to following him around from label to label as he gets rejected repeatedly for being too real and too gritty at too young an age. But they all agree he has a lot of talent and could be a huge star if he took a more Bow Wow approach to his music. It gets a little bit repetitive, although it’s certainly easy to root for the kid. He has a good head on his shoulders and is much more grown up (but not bitter) and intelligent than a lot of people probably would think or expect.

The two halves flow together pretty seamlessly, and make for a jam-packed 103 minutes, but once we get into Demo’s big city adventure, the Brown Sub gets completely lost. There’s virtually no mention of what’s going on down there while he’s away. I wish they would have talked more about the ghetto in general. Or at least give us updates before the credits roll. That’s just a hint as to how bad the filmmaking aspect of the movie actually is. It starts out right away with horrible video editing with sliding wipes with default fonts and black backgrounds making up the title sequence. The director’s narration seems out of place at first, but it turns out to be necessary. The shooting in general isn’t very good. I think he needed more cameras to cover the action. It’s a shame that such an interesting storyline is marred by shameless self promotion of Gittoes’ other project (“Soundtrack to War” – there, are you happy George?) and haphazard cinematography. Maybe he should have had the Lovett brothers shoot it for him. At least we know they have some talent.

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