August 14, 2003 was a Thursday. My husband was at work, and the boys and I were inside where it was air-conditioned because August in Michigan is hot. At 4:19 pm, all of the power went out. We went outside to see if it was just us, and as other neighbors who were home during the day started investigating, we realized that the power was out everywhere. It was creepy. I called my husband, whose office at the time was just a mile away. His building had backup power, so he was able to get online and find out that it wasn’t just us, it was EIGHT U.S. states plus Ontario, Canada. The largest blackout in American history, it now even has it’s own Wikipedia page.

blackout.jpgDirector Jerry LaMothe assembled a stellar cast and made “Blackout”, based on true events that occurred in Brooklyn, New York on that fateful day. The movie begins by showing us people from the neighborhood having a regular day, going to work, opening their small businesses, trying to find a job since being laid off after 9/11. Once the power goes off, the movie really gets going.

Zoe Saldana (”Drumline”) and Sean Blakemore are Claudine and James. She works for a magazine, he has been laid off since 9/11 and is really struggling. Before she leaves for work that morning, she agrees that he should move out. Jeffrey Wright (”Syriana”) is the neighborhood barber who has his regular customers in the shop that morning. Saul Rubinek (too many TV shows to list!) is the landlord of a building who is coming to fire his elderly janitor (the stellar Melvin Van Peebles), who he thinks is too old to do the job.

The interestingly named Michael B. Jordan (”All My Children”) is C.J., the young man who will be headed for college in the Fall, and works in the neighborhood FootLocker-type store, but some of his peers are jealous of him for his success. LaTanya Richardson (”Freedomland”) plays his mother. The rest of the cast reads like a Who’s Who of character actors, many of them were familiar to me from “Law and Order” and “CSI” and “The Wire”. There isn’t a single performance that isn’t up to par.

As darkness falls on the Brooklyn neighborhood, things get scary. There is looting, and violence, and terror. I felt fortunate that the worst thing I faced during the blackout was that it was so hot in our house. From the “Making of” documentary in the bonus features, I learned that in some neighborhoods around Brooklyn, things got pretty bad. But for most of the characters in “Blackout”, the darkness made them confront situations that they had been ignoring while living their regular lives.

All in all, this is a movie worth watching, even if you weren’t affected by the Blackout of 2003. It’s a bit slow to start, but once it gets going, these are stories that you are going to want to see resolved at the end. I was glad that I watched it, and it made me think about those events of 2003 that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I give this movie two thumbs up.

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2.5