Column: Years in the making, the MLK movie ‘King Blvd’ arrives in a serious, lighthearted way

Some years ago I met a young man with a dream. His name was Earl Hardy and his dream was to make a film about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Not about the man, but about the streets that had been named in his honor after he was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Hardy, a native of Detroit, said the idea behind the film had come to him more than a decade ago when he was searching for a job after graduating from college. Many of his potential employers were, if not taken aback, then inordinately interested that his home address was on Detroit’s Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

“There seemed to be some sort of stigma attached to it,” Hardy said.

He began to research MLK streets and was rather stunned. “In doing the research, I found that in so many ways and so many places, these streets are examples of how King’s dream has turned into a nightmare,” Hardy said.

“And that is no coincidence. Money, race and politics are all part of the problem.”

He was right about that. In the decades since his death, King was honored on nearly 1,000 streets in cities, towns and suburbs across the country, and a few in foreign lands.

Hardy had come to Chicago because, in a real sense, this is the fountainhead of the MLK streets, the first named in his honor, and he had read some stories I had written about it. Stories about how this did not happen because of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s admiration for King, but rather to placate the Black community before the Democratic National Convention, because Daley was still scarred by the West Side trouble that erupted in the wake of King’s murder. There were suggestions for a downtown street name change or one that cut a longer path through the city (Western Avenue, for example). Daley wasn’t interested, knowing that in certain white neighborhoods, those signs would be defaced or destroyed. And so on Aug. 8, 1968, South Park Way became Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, stretching from 22nd Street south to 115th Street.

Hardy and I talked at length then and we kept in touch. I would hear from him occasionally, mostly about the difficulties of raising money to make the film, which he did through various fundraising methods, screening portions of the film, parties and dealing with COVID-19 restrictions. He remained, admirably, always upbeat, confident.

And now his dream has become a reality.

It is titled “King Blvd,” available on Amazon Prime, has a running time of 75 minutes, $2.99 rental fee”] and begins with these onscreen words, “Inspired by the Funny, Crazy, Sad, Cool and MLK streets in the USA.”

It is not quite the movie I expected, which might have leaned toward conventional documentary, though it rests on some of Hardy’s experiences. But it is a fictionalized story, set in Detroit and focusing on a young man named Joshua (Bryan Carstarphen), who encounters some of the same resume biases that Hardy encountered and with the help of a couple of pals: Sara (Ashley Peper), who is white, trying to raise tuition for college, and Rakeem (Dez Cortez Crenshaw), a Black entrepreneur who operates his “food truck” bicycle). Together they recall and dream for better times for the street, saying people look and “see problems and losers, we see survivors.”

Hardy calls it a social comedy and it is peppered with humor of varying effectiveness, from some silly sequences featuring a mannequin’s head to the delightfully wacky business ideas of Rakeem. There is some sharp social commentary too, as the film skewers the lecherous behavior of a local politician, the officiousness of a bank’s loan officer and captures the changing attitudes of a young woman (Jeanette Drake), whose father was once a powerful mentor to a generation of young people on the street.

I think that much of the movie’s lightheartedness has been created and is aimed at what Hardy and pals hope will be a youthful audience. I’m all for that. He hopes his film will gain a wide audience. It should for its thought-provoking power.

Not all of the MLK streets on this planet are beaten up and bedraggled. But many are and they are parts of us. In a 2003 book, writer Jonathan Tilove and photographer Michael Falco visited more than 600 Martin Luther King-named streets across the country for “Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street.” They observed: “Map (the streets) and you map a nation within a nation, a place where white America seldom goes and Black America can be itself. It is a parallel universe with a different center of gravity and distinctive sensibilities, kinship at two or three degrees of separation, not six. There is no other street like it.”