Lance was unable to find a job he could earn money from. He could not use the technological skills he learned in prison. Who wants to hire a man who was a gang leader and just got out of jail?. But was forced to deliver food to the food store and agreed to this food in order to live.
Resonating with an authenticity borne of the experiences of its director/co-screenwriter Jamal Joseph, Chapter & Verse movingly portrays the plight of a recently released ex-con striving to make a new life for himself on the mean streets of Harlem.
Beaty's original screenplay and performance stand out to make Chapter & Verse a remarkable chapter in African-American storytelling from the twenty-first century.
Chapter &Verse is not simply a story about new beginnings. It's a film about all the ways things have changed for Black people (Black men in particular) and all of the ways that they have continued to remain the same.
The story, scripted by Beaty and poet/author-turned-filmmaker Jamal Joseph (who himself did five-and-a-half years in Leavenworth) dips into sloppy, melodramatic heavy-handedness, sullying the occasional spurts of fresh perspective.
The movie's wide-screen framing, ruthless plot reversals and say-what-you-mean writing sometimes recall a master of socially conscious cinema from another era, Sam Fuller. But this is a picture with its own strong voice.
The utter realness of this story and the way it has been handled is the resonating strength of Jamal Joseph's gripping, affecting study of survival in today's Harlem.