About an hour into the brief and dazzling Bushman, the central character announces, "I need a hamburger," and then the screen goes black for a few seconds. When the movie resumes, it's no longer a drama enlivened by a streetwise documentary sensibility, but a work of straight-up nonfiction. Relying on stills in this last stretch but maintaining the visual fluency of the preceding story, the final 10 minutes recount why director David Schickele stopped filming for a year: He was working instead on securing a release from prison for his wrongfully imprisoned leading man.
There are strong parallels between Gabriel, the onscreen outsider, and Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, the man who plays him. Both grew up in a Nigerian village. Like Gabriel, Okpokam was a graduate student at San Francisco State College. Schickele's screenplay was to have ended with Gabriel being deported after falling into trouble with the law. Before he could shoot those scenes, Okpokam's stateside adventure ended precisely that way.
By Sheri Linden (The Hollywood Reporter).
