Metacritic reviews

Blue Story is a 91-minute assault of sound and image that leaves no doubt about the vicious cycle of gang violence it presents. Prepare to be wowed.

It’s a Shakespearean rhapsody in indigo where love, friendship, betrayal and revenge swirl and blur with life-changing consequences.

It shouldn’t work yet it does, underscoring the tragedy of corrupted innocence, constricting codes of masculinity and the aftermath of trauma.

There are times when the familiarity of the urban melodrama hurts Blue Story, particularly in the lack of depth to his characters. (Odubola is a find, but the rest of the cast has some actors who feel a bit amateur.)

Blue Story is very much a blast of something present tense. Rapman’s scenes boil over with life, as he crafts an opera of innocence infected by gangsta pathology.

While the rough-hewn filmmaking occasionally reveals Rapman's lack of experience working with a larger cinematic canvas, Blue Story boasts an immediacy and energy that perfectly suit the material.

Blue Story doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to films about turf wars, but its personal, humanizing themes about friendship, love, youth, and black masculinity keeps you riveted, Onwubolu’s lyrical respites aside.

The film has a powerful sense of place, with details that feel authentic and, in some cases, lived through. Yet Rapman’s civic-minded lyrics (“There really ain’t no winners when you’re playing with them guns”) have a habit of reducing the drama to tidy morals.

The musical interludes in which Rapman narrates significant plot points offer a welcome change of pace, but the subject matter at play here is a little too common to truly stand out from the pack.

Onwubolu avoids the usual flash and posturing in favour of a careful, rooted storytelling, finding subtly different perspectives on gang life, and offering his characters as many ways out as there are ways in.