TV REVIEWS : ‘Punk’: An Odyssey for the Young at Heart

Carl Franklin’s AFI thesis film, “Punk,” achieves in 30 minutes what most good movies take nearly two hours to accomplish. It airs at 10:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 as part of PBS’ adventuresome summer series “Alive TV.”

Amazingly, Franklin, in writing and shooting the story of a 9-year-old South-Central Los Angeles boy grappling with sexuality and manhood in the midst of squalor, makes you experience the odyssey of growing up as if for the first time.

He achieves this by way of introducing a decidedly personal ring to the material and by virtue of a terrific young actor, Wayne Collins Jr. Rather than histrionic or neurotic or saccharine, this is a protagonist who is basically a black Huck Finn, wide-eyed, confused and edgy about the dark world around him.

In short, like Huck, he lights out for the territory, albeit maintaining a loving relationship with his hard-working, single-parent mom (Cindy McGee).

He and his best pal (Shaun D. Hunter, so convincing he looks as if he were yanked from some real fourth-grade classroom) catch the after-school thrill of sudden freedom, scampering over the hills and dales that Dick and Jane used to wander, except the landscape these days includes a transvestite bar, graffiti-strewn freeway underpasses and a restroom in a park where an ice cream man (a riveting performance by Darin Taylor) attempts to molest our awakening young hero.

How the boy resolves his dilemma with this stalker might jolt you. Franklin, who won critical bouquets last year for that exceptional, breakaway independent full-length South-Central gangster movie “One False Move,” is such a good writer, however, that there’s no other possible ending.

Whatever your race and your neighborhood, this little movie plunges to the heart of what it’s like to be 9 years old and lighting out across town. Sure, it has a message--how society is miserably failing its kids--but it never pleads its agenda. It shows you instead.