“Dark and Tender” is a brief but vital conversation-starter — The Leader

Still from Dark and Tender: A Film by the Chronically UnderTouched (CUT) Project

“Dark and Tender” treats us to a succession of thoroughly wholesome and uplifting images of Black men holding hands, embracing and even tucking each other into blankets, during a retreat conducted by Johnson, but it also shows that trust, caring and hearing each other are an essential foundation for all the steps that might follow.

The degree to which Black men’s emotional isolation is compounded by their sociopolitical plight is explicitly called out by one white-haired retreat participant, who observed that James Baldwin had only three friends — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers — all of whom were lost to violence.

As documentaries go, “Dark and Tender” is a brief but vital conversation-starter, and I eagerly await the dialogues and insights that Johnson might yield by continuing to explore this vein.

— Kirk Boxleitner, “Local film roundup: ‘Dark and Tender’ promotes platonic touch”, The Leader