The Brother From Another Planet

Director: John Sayles

1984 / 108min / 35mm

New to Earth and fleeing bondage on his own planet, a mute telepath extraterrestrial known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton)—who has the outward appearance of a twentysomething African American male hits the streets of Harlem—gets a crash course in the baffling complexities of race and class politics in Reagan era America while trying to stay one step ahead of a pair of bounty hunters from back home played by David Staithairn and writer-director Sayles. A scrappy, endlessly inventive, and drily funny cultural assimilation allegory, with Morton’s wordless central performance invoking the great silent films of yore, and the nocturnal street photography of Ernest R. Dickerson capturing a radically altered ’80s Manhattan.