“I have to make myself.”

The Dynamiter REVIEW

Robbie lives in a poor shack in rural Mississippi with his stepbrother, Fess, and his grandmother, Gemma. Robbie’s mother has abandoned the family and he’s never known his real father. Robbie’s older brother Lucas is something of a “loser.” He comes home after dropping out of college and sleeps on the couch – capable of picking up women at will but unmotivated to get a job.

We get the sense from the beginning that Robbie is trying to be a good father figure to Fess while being a good caregiver to his senile grandmother. Robbie entertains Fess, tells him jokes, insists that Fess treat his grandmother with curtesy and love, and use good table manners and practice good hygiene. Robbie’s life is not being made any easier by the shenanigans of his brother Lucas.

As the film opens, we see Robbie taking advantage of an unsupervised hallway at school to pilfer a jackknife for Fess who earlier noted that he had lost his. Robbie is a bit of a Robin Hood because he takes a knife from the locker of a kid outside that he just saw bullying a smaller boy. We get a sense that Robbie is a conscientiously kind person. He treats his stepbrother, his dementia-troubled grandmother, a Black neighbor, and a handicapped boy in the hallway with respect. His theft of the knife is not without a sense of nobility you might say. But he is caught.

We begin to see how easy it would be for Robbie to get sucked into the vortex of a “justice-involved life” i.e. petty crime. “Every year you have been here, you have just done minimal” his principal scolds him while mercifully offering him a way out of the trouble he is in. “A name means more than just a name,” he tells Robbie, hoping to inspire the young man to care about his reputation. A few moments later, the boy whose knife he stole challenges him to come to a party and threatens to tell everyone he is a liar and a thief if he does not bring the stolen knife.

Robbie has a lot of dice loaded against him. He feels the need to provide for Fess and his grandmother. His dad is gone. His mother is gone to California and is not coming back. His brother Is a scoundrel. Robbie has some decisions to make. We begin to see him make a habit of petty theft (he shaves pennies down to abscond with drinks from a Coke machine). He steals money from a friend’s birthday cards. You get the picture. It is only a matter of time before Robbie finds himself arrested and, in that moment, his life sort of hangs in the balance.

The officer who arrests him lets him go after handcuffing him, hoping maybe that a little scare will interrupt the trajectory that he is clearly on.

That comment about his name seems to begin to work on him. He comes to agree that he doesn’t want to go through life with a reputation . . . . “What’s a name but everything,” he says in a letter to his principal.

And so, Robbie starts building his new life by spending his savings on paint for the front porch. From there, he hitchhikes into town to start looking door to door for work. He keeps getting turned down but he is persistent. He takes the only job anyone will offer him. He starts working at a gas station for $30 a day and accepts the owner’s humiliating demand that he clean a filthy gas station bathroom to start. Robbie is quietly determined to work hard and earn an income to support Fess and his grandmother, understanding that his mother is not coming back and Lucas is useless.

Lucas is worse than useless, actually. He seems to be devoted to dragging his younger brother down with him into the moral mud. Here is the pivot of the film. Robby is trying to be a responsible mentor and example to Fess and caring grandson to gramma Gemma, all while Robby’s older brother Lucas is trying to introduce him to smoking, lying, womanizing, cheating, despair and theft. Robby can feel the pull from two directions and in a moment of moral clarity – decides that there is no middle path if his self-respect is going to mean anything to him. He makes his excruciating decision, and everything after follows.

One almost gets the sense that the universe sees what he does and reciprocates.

“I used to dream when I was younger,” Robby tells us at one point in the film.

“Even then my dreams were tinier than other people’s. I dreamed of a house. Something little on the edge of a town. I dreamed of one day buying that house. I dreamed of a job. Maybe having people work for me. Then I dreamed of a dinner at my house with everyone there. Gramma Gimmel, Lucas, Fess, and mom.”

“The house got smaller and smaller in my dreams,” he concludes the thought, “So small that I would fall asleep and not dream at all. I close my eyes and see nothin’.”

“You asked me to write about my family,” Robby tells his school counselor in a letter as he catches a ride out of town to a new life. “But what am I going to write. We were given each other, and you can’t get born again to change that.”

“How did they make me?” He asks of his rather wretched parents. “I don’t know that,” he concludes, “I have to make myself.”

The film ends with Robby getting a Coke from that coke machine.

With real money.

He sits down to lunch at a diner with his friend and her brother – themselves moving away from an unworthy parent. A real breakfast is served and the three of them hold hands as if to pray.

They head out in the truck.

We get the sense that maybe Robbie is being born again into a new family.

Question for Comment: What does this film have to teach about restorative justice, poverty, and character? Was there a moment in your own life when you had to make a choice? A choice that went against the current of your ancestral or parental influences?