'City So Real' review: A sobering Chicago symphony in five movements, on Hulu and National Geo
CHICAGO — Chicago, you should watch it.
Everybody everywhere else, you should watch it, too. Seek out “City So Real” either to confirm your suspicions about how this city functions, or to affirm your idea of Chicago as the brash epitome of American character, from politics on down. Or up.
There’s another way to watch it, too: as a gradual realization that Chicago is neither Trump’s idea of Chicago (hell) or the typical thin-skinned civic booster’s idea of Chicago (heaven). The grand, sprawling five-episode docuseries complicates and humanizes your idea of the place.
Available Friday on Hulu, “City So Real” covers nearly three staggering years. Those years include the most recent mayoral race up through a newly added fifth chapter devoted to the early- and mid-2020 pandemic fallout and every sort of social upheaval, violent as well as peaceable.
“Never a lovely so real”: That’s how Nelson Algren described the city, comparing his feelings for it to “loving a woman with a broken nose.” The series is one of director Steve James’ peak examples of civic self-portraiture (without Algren’s attitudes toward women), and the latest stirring achievement from the maker of “Hoop Dreams,” “The Interrupters” and “America to Me.”
The opening seconds feature a close-up of the gravestone of Laquan McDonald, fatally shot 16 times in 2014 by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. This seems so long ago now. Even so, Van Dyke’s trial; two-term mayor Rahm Emanuel’s unsuccessful bid to keep the telltale dash-cam video a private matter; the widespread community outrage; all this is more than enough for one series.
James works with his producing partner Zak Piper, along with co-cinematographer Jackson James, the director’s son and colleague. They wind the Van Dyke trial, among other strands, around the 14-candidate 2019 Chicago mayoral race and subsequent run-off election. En route to the historic Lori Lightfoot victory, marking the city’s first openly gay and first African-American female mayor, much of the local media sold the developing story as a contest between Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle (forever chained to her written notes in “City So Real” footage) vs. Illinois Comptroller Susana A. Mendoza. Surprise!
In Episode 3, James and his camera join Lightfoot on a commute from her Logan Square bungalow, as she’s on the phone with a campaign colleague. At one point Lightfoot goes off on the city’s long, ignoble history of aldermanic weaseling and the 1990s federal anti-corruption probe known as the Silver Shovel investigation. “Every single one off those dumb-f—s got caught,” Lightfoot says at one point, and given pocket-lining so epically blatant, it’s hard to argue wording that any other way.
The first four episodes of “City So Real,” completed earlier this year, visit so many Chicago neighborhoods, parades, picnic grounds, drugstores, bars and places of business. James and company strike gold with contrasting footage of two haircut joints: the South Shore neighborhood’s Sideline Studio salon (now closed) and, in Bridgeport, Joe’s 26th Street Barber Shop, frequented by retired Chicago Police Department employees.
At Sideline, an inflammatory argument breaks out between a postal worker and, a generation younger, his barber, as they debate Black manhood, discipline, family dynamics. They’re screaming at each other one minute, back to business and in the barber’s chair the next, laughing it off.
In Bridgeport, meanwhile, three regulars stop in for some doughnuts and a little retired-cop humor. (At one point one of them relays a stunningly heartless police shooting joke.) Elsewhere in that footage one of the men, not identified on screen, starts an anecdote with a casual: “I know a guy that shot a guy.” In the space of maybe a minute, James captures the bone-deep bitterness so many in law enforcement feel about the judicial system — as well as the bone-deep fear of police so many Chicagoans cannot shake.
Throughout “City So Real” another story emerges, that of a city in which half the power structure and citizenry wonders what happened to the old guard and the niceties, while the other half pushes ahead with different agendas. In one sequence, then-Mayor Emanuel fails to quell student protesters fighting a police academy training project on the West Side. In a Gold Coast penthouse dinner party scene (featuring, among others, Tribune theater critic Chris Jones), ex-CEO of Playboy Enterprises and political strategist Christie Hefner convenes the sort of salon dinner that, as she puts it, wistfully, “no one seems to do anymore.” Closer to the ground, Lyft driver Tracey Champion relays a heart-sickening account of the racist abuse she’s had to put up with “ever since Trump got into office.”
These people are our people; their anger, disdain, love and wary coexistence is ours, too.
The series’ newly added final chapter captures a city on the ropes, in a nation suffering one haymaker after another. The late-May civil unrest sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd fed into a river of outrage. Egregious federal pandemic bungling; more Black men dying under the boot of law enforcement; protests here, looting and property damage there; economic, physical and psychic devastation everywhere. “We can’t continue to tear each other apart,” Lightfoot says in the new footage, under the strain of “back to back to back crises.”
The new episode feels more expedient and deadline-pressured than what precedes it. But without that coda, the city couldn’t tell its open-ended story properly. “City So Real” ends on a note of harsh but necessary honesty about where we are.
There’s some padding here and there. Yet one viewer’s restlessness, I suspect, will stem from another viewer’s idea of a royal payoff. I love the extended, beautifully escalating contested-ballot square-off at the Board of Elections, between mayoral candidate Ja’Mal Green and fellow candidate Willie Wilson’s right-hand man, Rickey Hendon. This immerses us in politics, the least glamorous sort, in real time. The minutiae and microaggressions add up to a terrific little one-act comedy, and maybe that’s the city incarnate: millions of simultaneous, overlapping one-acts fighting for better billing in America’s messiest street festival.
In the final “City So Real” episode, Tim Tuten, co-owner of COVID-embattled Bucktown bar and music venue The Hideout, takes aim at the nearby Lincoln Yards development threatening to obliterate the neighborhood. Tuten notes that the pop-up drive-in on the Lincoln Yard site this summer showcased “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
“This is their idea of what Chicago is,” Tuten says, regarding his corporate nemesis. “A bratty, entitled rich kid, a suburban tourist who comes in, trashes the city — and then leaves.” Our heroes tell us something about ourselves. The self-interest, the cynicism, the resilience and, yes, the heroism populating “City So Real” will mean different things to different people. But it’s one hell of a panorama.
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‘CITY SO REAL’
4 stars
Rating: TV-14 (for language)
Running time: 6:37 (over five episodes)
Available on Hulu starting Friday Oct. 30
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