It’s a refrain the narrator says throughout Netflix’s new film, All Day and a Night: “Slavery taught black people how to survive, but not how to live. And that’s what we pass on to each other. My father taught me how to take my fucked-up life out on everyone else.”
All Day and a Night tells the painful story of that narrator, Jahkor Lincoln, a young man from Oakland, CA, who fulfills his own prophecy in the opening minutes of the film. Played by Ashton Sanders (you might remember him from the middle act of Moonlight), Jah is an aspiring rapper struggling to steer clear of the path of his father, JD (played by Jeffrey Wright)—an abusive drug addict serving life in prison. We first meet Jah when he's mumbling bars to himself in his car, hyping himself up to kill Malcolm, a mystery character we know nothing about at that point. Jah gets out of the car, finds Malcolm and his partner, and shoots them both. Then, the film cuts to Jah's emotional court hearing, and soon after, the prison yard, where he's is only a couple yards away from his father.
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Although it never quite reaches the originality of its other Oakland-set counterpart Fruitvale Station, All Day and a Night is a heartbreaking look at the cycle of trauma and racism black men face in their communities, and what fathers pass onto their sons. The rest of the film plays out, narratively at least, as a sort of Memento-Moonlight mashup—showing us the events that led to Jah committing a double homicide, spliced with scenes from his childhood. So while Jah appears to turn around his life for the better in the final moments of the film, it’s a bit of a confusing path we take to get there, filled with conspiracy, double-crossing, and murder. Let’s take a look at the final scenes of All Day and a Night, and what the last-act betrayal means for Jah’s future.
Throughout All Day and a Night, Jah—a quiet, shy kid who vows never to engage with drug violence—can’t catch a break. When he shows his music to the big-egoed Rick Ross ripoff Thug’ish Trex, the guy brushes him off. Jah breaks up with his pregnant girlfriend, Delanda, after he finds a sex tape of her and another guy. He gets into a fight with his mom’s new boyfriend, which leads to Jah’s mom telling him she never wants to see him again. And Jah finds out that one of his best friends, Lamark, might never walk again because of injuries he suffered fighting in the military.
Meanwhile, Jah is spending more and more time with Big Stunna, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a neighborhood crime boss he meets through his other best friend, TQ. About halfway through the film, Jah is at a party with Stunna, when we see Malcolm for the first time since the beginning of the story. Malcolm shoots one of Stunna’s men in the head—revealing there’s a turf war going on between Malcolm and Stunna. He starts looking for someone to kill Malcolm. And, in his eyes, who better than Jah? He asks Jah—who, at this point, is at the lowest point we’ve seen him so far, feeling like he has nothing left to lose—who agrees. Violence feels like Jah’s last resort.
Matt Kennedy
All right, now bear with me here—the rest of this is told with some scattershot time-skipping that’s a little hard to keep track of. Jah has two massive revelations that change how the rest of All Day and a Night plays out. First up: Right before Jah kills Malcolm, he flashes back to his childhood, where he witnesses his father buying drugs from a stranger. When his dad leaves, young Jah walks up to the stranger and tells him to stop selling drugs to JD. Turns out the drug dealer is Malcolm—now revealed as an indirect source of pain in Jah’s childhood—who tells him that JD is his best customer, and laughs him off.
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Credit: EsquireSecond thing: Jah remembers a conversation he heard between TQ and Trex, and suddenly realizes that they were plotting to murder Stunna—revealing they were moles working for Malcolm the whole time. Stunna realizes this too, murders Trex, while TQ is sent to prison, and given the orders to murder Jah. Since Jah realizes this, he stabs TQ to death in the prison yard before he can do the same to him.
Unfortunately, the double-triple-quadruple-crossing muddles the buildup to All Day and a Night’s most beautiful, and uplifting moments: Jah, after spending the whole movie telling Delanda he didn’t want to be a part of his child’s life, resolves to be a better father than JD was to him. Then, we see JD in the past, holding an infant Jah, saying, “Watch. He gon’ rise above all the bullshit we struggle with out here.” This leads to one final shot of adult Jah and JD, father and son, sitting together in the prison yard—having made peace with each other.
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