Luce is on track to become valedictorian of his Northern Virginia high school. He’s the achiever at the head of his class and he’s black—but not “black black,” as one of his white friends puts it. In Luce’s opening scene, the titular protagonist delivers an inspirational address to a parent-teacher-student assembly. He says all the right things and pulls all the proper toggles. He’s rewarded with appreciate applause. The lone dissenter in the back of the hall, his history teacher, Miss Wilson, makes a sour face that portends trouble.
Kevin Harrison Jr. gives an emotionally confident performance as Luce, a talented young man with secrets. At first, Octavia Spencer, co-starring as Miss Wilson, threatens to reprise her role in Ma as a lonely wacko African American woman—Luce’s trailer appears to promise as much. But it gets complicated. If not always dramatically satisfying, Luce manages to subvert expectations, confuse our sympathies and call contemporary pieties into the dock.
The pieties begin in Luce’s home. He is an Eritrean refugee, adopted by Amy (Naomi Watts) and Peter (Tim Roth) after they saw picture of the boy, age 7. Amy is a physician, Peter a financial manager, and they devote their ample resources to rehabilitating a child damaged by vicious warfare, grooming his resume for college admissions. Not that he isn’t exceptional in his own right. He’s the school’s debate team champion and participates in track, just a step below tennis and horseback riding as a patrician competitive sport.
Trouble comes when Miss Wilson calls Amy about a class project she finds troubling. The assignment involved writing a paper in the voice of a historical figure. Luce chose Frantz Fanon, the militant Marxist anti-colonialist. Wilson finds its call to violence disturbing, given the “climate surrounding school security.” Searching Luce’s locker, the teacher confiscated a cache of illegal fireworks capable of starting fires. Luce tells his parents that Wilson has a vendetta against him; soon enough, he will respond with a vendetta of his own.
Some of Luce’s best moments occur around the kitchen table where Amy, like a good upper-middle class mom, expresses disapproval through silence. However, Peter must have a bit of blue collar in his background. Unlike his excruciatingly correct wife, he can be blunt and nurtures his own gripes about their decision to adopt a war-zone kid. “I wanted something simple and normal,” like siring his own child with his wife, he tells Amy. “Our life didn’t have to be a political statement.”
And while Amy and Peter bask in the glow of PC social approval, their adopted son struggles with his role as prodigy. It’s not easy being cast as a young Obama or a Mandela-in-the-making. “I only get to be a saint or a monster?” he demands of mom as an inquiry into his behavior, spurred by Wilson, starts to go out of bounds.
Wilson’s lower-middle class status is quietly contrasted with Luce’s more affluent family. She has a troubled background, perhaps insufficiently explained in the screenplay, and apparently worked hard to rise so far. Wilson is determined to encourage—or coerce—black students to defy their stereotypes. Spoiler alert: one of the film’s most gripping exchanges happens near the end between the antagonists. “Why do we have to be perfect to be accepted?” Luce asks. “America put you in a box,” she replies. “We’re all in it together, whether we like it or not.”
