LOVE, BROOKLYN - Mark Reviews Movies

Love, Brooklyn, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

Writers are always told to write what they know, but perhaps, there should be an amendment to that idea. Just because a writer knows about writers and writing doesn't mean a story about a writer is one worth telling. Honestly, all writers should know that, simply because the actual work of writing is only interesting to the person doing it.

Paul Zimmerman's screenplay for Love, Brooklyn is about a writer, assigned to write an article about how his borough is changing and why that might be for the better. Thankfully, we only see Roger (André Holland) sitting in front of a keyboard two or three times here, as he struggles to write the article the way his editor wants him to and, ultimately, does put down some words that find a happy-enough medium between the assignment and how he really feels. Trying to write about this writer attempting to write and actually writing is already dull enough.

The real story of Zimmerman's script, however, is a love triangle, in which Roger is torn between two women. One is a woman he has dated in the past, and the two cannot stop talking to and hanging out with each other, because each is the only other person who seems to truly understand the other.

Casey (Nicole Beharie) runs an art gallery, by the way, that has been in her family over the course of three generations. Since Brooklyn is changing with increasing gentrification, she could sell the building and earn significantly more money than she might make after years of, as is the current trend for her, not selling paintings.

The second woman is a single mother, recently widowed, who is getting used to the idea of dating again and doesn't quite know how her young daughter Ally (Cadence Reese) will handle it. Just from that description, whose story here seems to be at the bottom of the list of potential?

It's Roger, of course, who, apart from spending his time avoiding his job because he's so uncertain of what he wants to or should write, is indecisive about everything else in his life, too. The guy's a walking, talking cliché on at least two fronts, and they're not even interesting clichés, at that.

His friend Alan (Roy Wood Jr.), a married man who has recently become obsessed with the idea of having an affair, is another cliché, for example, but he's at least amusing in his wandering stares at any woman who walks past him, his awkwardness whenever he actually speaks to another woman, and the obvious fact, chuckled at by his wife Beth (Saycon Sengblog), that he wouldn't cheat if he had the chance. It would be too much of an effort for the man.

Then, there's Roger, who sits in his apartment not doing anything, rides his bike around Brooklyn (in some admittedly lovely montages of the neighborhood) taking in nothing in particular, and goes back and forth between Casey and Nicole with no real goal in mind for either relationship. The character is at least played by Holland, who's too good an actor not to invest some degree of charm and sense of internal conflict in this guy. The performance still doesn't make Roger anywhere near as interesting as the other characters surrounding him, but it is something.

Far more compelling are Casey, who has to wrestle with the practical side of a failing business and the possibility that she's only maintaining it out of obligation and not because she loves the work anymore, and Nicole, who has a moment of revelation about what her life has become that instantly makes us wonder why her story hasn't been the entire focus of director Rachael Abigail Holder's movie. Casey is sort of a mirror image of Roger in her own indecisiveness, but her world—of art and eccentric patrons and mysterious real estate developers—feels wider and more intriguing than anything about her counterpart. Beharie's performance is clever, too, because there's a sense that her attachment to Roger is much like her clinging to the gallery. As difficult as both may be, there's a sense of familiar comfort to both the man and the business.

As played by Wise, Nicole stands out even more, because there is real subtlety to her performance. Here, Nicole is a woman who has seen and been through a lot more than she ever could have anticipated, can't even consider what she might want in the long term, and almost certainly knows better than to count on a man like Roger, except that he offers something she knows and does so right now.

During that aforementioned scene when she comprehends what this relationship means about her life at the moment, the outpouring of tears simply come without her missing a beat or even noticing them. How many tears must have come before that moment for them not to faze her anymore? How much more engaging could Love, Brooklyn have been if Zimmerman realized his protagonist is the weakest element of this story?

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