Metacritic reviews

Charm City Kings is beautiful and important, unabashedly Black, yet rarely traumatic, and almost always determined statement. Soto has crafted an incredible empathetic narrative, one mile of road at a time.

Charm City Kings distinguishes itself from similar fare not just through its location and eye-popping bikes but also with the believably imperfect people that populate it.

Guided by Angel Manuel Soto’s slick direction and a breakthrough performance from Jahi Di’Allo Winston, the movie works overtime to energize real-world struggles with the thrill of street life.

Its abundance of plot contrivances in the final act and overly scripted dialogue hold it back from greatness, but two excellent performers overcome all of this familiarity. I can't want to see them again.

Charm City Kings lands on an elegiac, bittersweet note rather than a happy one, and doesn’t feature as many crazy, exhilarating bike stunts as you might hope. But in its view of a world where kids make their own fun and also, sometimes, their own bad choices, it rings true. Sometimes becoming a man is the hardest stunt to pull off.

Sure, the motorcycle wheelies are cool, but there’s nothing more intense than the raw emotion that comes from a mother trying to protect her child.

Charm City Kings clearly knows what it’s doing; unfortunately, what it’s doing is often just as obvious to us.

The film’s truly ridiculous plot choices — the phony twists that make you leave the theater feeling like you’ve inhaled a tank of carbon monoxide — are its own invention, bolted onto a likable, if formulaic, charmer.

Sadly, despite its title referencing a dirt bike gang, Charm City Kings doesn’t really show us anything we haven’t seen before. Unable to harness the story’s potential, the filmmakers instead deliver a mostly canned movie that flatlines 20 minutes before it comes to an end.

The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.