Review: They Cloned Tyrone

Director:  Juel Taylor

Stars:  Teyonah Parris, John Boyega, Jamie Foxx

While half the world is getting booked in for their Barbenheimers, it’d be remiss not to point out that one of the quirkier offerings of the year has been released direct to streaming via Netflix, giving those not snappy enough to secure cinema tickets a more than viable alternative in the comfort of their own homes. Pitched somewhere between blaxploitation, Black Mirror and the bonkersness of Boots Riley, Juel Taylor’s confident debut They Cloned Tyrone mixes familiar ingredients but seasons them with a unique flavour that is all his own.

We’re in a deliberately non-specific American suburb known as The Glen. It’s a Black neighbourhood on the down turn, overrun – or at least typified – by gang culture, drugs and the unglamorous transactions of the sex trade. John Boyega is Fontaine, a drug-dealer looking to collect from preening pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx; also a producer). Fontaine gets himself plugged six times for his trouble… only to wake up right as rain the next morning. Querulous over the hows and the whys of Fontaine’s stupefying resurrection, Charles, sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) and the man himself start Nancy Drew-ing to find out what’s going on beneath the surface of their unsuspecting burg. A trap house kitted out with an express elevator to hell is only the start of their discoveries.

In the wake of Jordan Peele’s seismic Get Out there has been a welcome flurry of stranger tales from Black filmmakers. They Clone Tyrone furthers this trend, whipping up motifs from recognisable sci-fi yarns and repurposing them to highlight some specifically Black anxieties. Yo-Yo, Fontaine and Charles see conspiracies everywhere. In the food they eat, in the music they hear, even in the products they use to wash their hair. A culture of behaviour modification is unveiled around them, coded specifically to attack portions of Black culture.

The amorphous ‘Man’ is broadly the culprit here, though a familiar face is eventually pinned to the subterranean project. Still, the suspicion of authority is the first and most natural to come to in Taylor’s world, a place built from the brio of ’70s blaxploitation, but very much situated in a more modern era of flip phones and Blockchain. The Glen is all smog and gasoline shimmer, a grainy, hazy neighbourhood that’s been kept slightly out of time for who knows how long, and the insinuation from the get-go is that outside forces are dictating the styles, fashions and aesthetics that persist there.

This idea that the US government has a specific plan for it’s African American communities is an echo of the world we recognise, where prejudicial policing and the systematic and deliberate ghettoisation of certain districts has been long evident. Multi-pronged approaches to breed and maintain cultures of fear and poverty. Modern day urban suppression. Once the extent of the conspiracies against the populus of The Glen are revealed, a key (white) authoritarian character sums it up succinctly; “We own you”. In Taylor’s paranoiac funhouse mirror of America, slavery has merely changed wardrobe.

If the cinematic reference points for They Cloned Tyrone are both multiple and easily identifiable (Soylent Green, The Stuff, They Live et al), Taylor’s particular rendering feels unique. He has an idiosyncratic ear for dialogue that his actors traffic in mumbled rhythms and worn-in cadences that give the movie’s world a feel as lived-in as its smoky motel rooms and rundown trap houses. As noted, there’s a fondness for a bygone era that evidences itself in the fashions, cars and locales. Here the drive-in classics of Gordon Parks, Melvin Van Peebles and Jack Hill are revered and rekindled through a consistent use of the old ‘cigarette burn’ tells in the top right corner of frame; an analogue remembrance quite unnecessary in the age of streaming. Yet, They Cloned Tyrone is far from a Black Dynamite style parody piece. It’s not quite so broad. But it uses the trappings of old to accentuate its sense of manufactured cultural inertia.

A little time in the company of his main trio gets us on their side, but Taylor is in no immediate hurry. This tall tale moves at a steady pace pitched to match its piecemeal reveals. And while The Glen is meant to be anywhere, its foggy gloaming and empty spacious streets bring to mind the abandoned sections of Detroit as favoured by filmmakers like David Robert Mitchell and Jim Jarmusch.

As the title suggests, the colourful experiments happening beneath the streets of The Glen include cloning, which reinforces the sense of cultural identity under threat and manipulation. Fontaine’s assured sense of self is under explicit attack. Taylor uses multiple genre motifs to return us over and over to this fear, even rolling out a zombie-like mob; the ultimate manifestation of a society without semblance of self.

Foxx’s utterances particularly require a keen ear from time to time as Charles is prone to muttering into his own chest, and though she is favoured some character depth, Parris feels a shade underutilised (especially as the third act is triggered by her capture, steering us close to a “rescue the princess” vibe), but They Cloned Tyrone remains an agreeably stanky gem, especially considering Netflix’s generally unambitious Originals of late.