Critics reviews

We are rudely reminded that our protagonist, now looking old enough to carry the moniker "young man," has grown into the target for societal violence that comes with being a black man in urban America. This isn't to make 12 O'CLOCK BOYS sound overly heavy (which it can be when you think about it), but to indicate how much depth and pathos is contained in a movie that is so unapologetically, deliriously entertaining.

A thin, problematic and amateurishly-made documentary, "12 O'Clock Boys" plays like two films awkwardly grafted together... Once you've seen 10 minutes or so of the Boys doing their police-baiting wheelies and other stunts, you get the picture; jaw-dropping as it sometimes is, much more of it would quickly become redundant and tedious.

For the most part, 12 O'Clock Boys is just a loose-limbed portrait of a community, with special emphasis on one slightly wayward teenager; its rhythm is the jagged rhythm of everyday life, and its primary asset is its unemphatic authenticity, offering a window into a very specific time and place.

12 O'Clock Boys" packs more life into its 72 minutes than many longer documentaries do. But in the movie's compressed experience, the director, Lotfy Nathan, takes cues from his roving subjects: young dirt bike daredevils who pour into Baltimore streets en masse for the fleeting thrills of speed, danger and the perfect wheelie.

At its best, the film plays as an on-the-ground critique of systemic racism and ghettoization. It's true that Nathan sees a little too much magical-realist allure in his young protagonist's vroom-vroom idols. (Many of the illegal stunts are filmed in rhapsodic slo-mo that gives them a cringeworthy Beasts of the Southern Wild affect.) Yet the director is also cuttingly aware of the corrupt outside forces that birthed the Boys, for better and for worse.

In slow-motion shots, Nathan captures the riders' pride in mastery and thrill in adventure. Discussions with Pug's mother and other relatives, his elder neighbors, and veteran riders reveal the underlying conflicts—the perception of hostile authority and widespread indifference—at the heart of the defiantly public self-assertions

Throughout its brisk 75 minutes, 12 O'Clock Boys constantly divides itself between fulfilling the conventions of the informational talking-heads documentary and aiming for a more poetically impressionistic quality, especially whenever the film turns its camera back to Pug.

The star of the other Baltimore film of note, mythopoeic doc 12 O'Clock Boys, is an African-American teenager named Pug, a scrawny braggart who relishes and seizes the chance to perform his own legend before the camera. First-time filmmaker Lotfy Nathan manages, miraculously, to keep up with Pug while he attempts to join the ranks of the titular gang... These moments of perfect equilibrium are drawn out into voluptuous reverie with dreamy slo-mo—this is what immortality looks like.