‘Barry’ Gives A Glimpse of Obama at 20

It’s an odd thing to imagine Barack Obama before the campaign trail. To zoom in on a young man just beginning his studies at Columbia University via a childhood spent in Hawaii, Washington State and Indonesia.

In ‘Barry’ (2016), a biopic about a slice of young Obama’s life, there is no Michelle. There is no ambition to become the leader of the free world or to be the first African American president.

Instead, there is a voice.

That deep, charismatic sound replicated by Devon Terrell who plays Obama in 1981. Then a gangly 20-year-old reading W E B Du Bois, playing basketball and feeling a little let down by the New York scene so unlike the pulsing city portrayed by Jack Kerouac.

Sensitive, stoic and embroiled in the quandary of being half black and half white, Obama attempts to find a place to belong. In Harlem with people darker, poorer and more aggrieved than he is and in the halls of the Yale Club where he has dinner with his white girlfriend’s parents while pondering about an incoming trip to Kenya.

Though there is little foreshadowing of who this young man will eventually become, in ‘Barry,’ director Vikram Ghandi does give us a sobering scene: The one-day president walking upstairs past portraits of great and powerful white men at the Yale Club only to be mistaken for a bathroom attendant a beat later.

Mostly frank about Barry’s struggle with racial identity, the use of Obama’s nickname is telling.

Not yet Barack Obama, rather a young man defiant in the face of prejudice from white law enforcement as well as black religious fanatics, ‘Barry’ draws some of his gravity from what viewers already know.

That he will be president. That his father will pass away. That he will marry a woman named Michelle Robinson who isn’t depicted in the film.

Offering a little insight into Obama’s formative years, his desire to belong and his ability to relate to all kinds of people, ‘Barry’ is Obama as we are yet to see him.

Fraught, smoking, learning about Socrates, Aristotle and government rule in between trying to find the words to send to a Kenyan father he barely knows.

A biopic focused on the moment before Obama decides to shake off doubt and simply be who and what he is, ‘Barry’ is a quiet, thoughtful film prone to stating the obvious while uncovering small, captivating facets of a well-known figure who remains utterly intriguing.

See this to glimpse Obama in the making and to scribble down a reading list that includes Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Du Bois courtesy of a man who once said “Politics is bullshit. The president is an actor,” then went on to play the lauded role of a lifetime.

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