“Barry”: New Netflix movie looks at Obama’s student days

He smokes one cigarette after another, is introverted and does not like parties. His name is Barry. One day, many years from now, he will be the first African-American president of the United States. Netflix’s new movie "Barry," which is available on the streaming service now, looks at the life of Barack Obama 35 years […]

He smokes one cigarette after another, is introverted and does not like parties. His name is Barry. One day, many years from now, he will be the first African-American president of the United States.

Netflix’s new movie "Barry," which is available on the streaming service now, looks at the life of Barack Obama 35 years ago when he was a student in New York. Barry, played by Devon Terrell, is a fairly normal young man. It’s 1981 and he’s attending Columbia University.

His apartment in Morningside Heights is not far from the campus, but is at the same time a world away – crime and poverty are the backdrop of his new life. Yet he feels more at home on the basketball court in his neighbourhood than at the elite university where he’s the only non-white person in his class.

The reality of a divided America, the separation between white and black, rich and poor, hits Barry hard. And with his white mother and Kenyan father he feels like he doesn’t fit in anywhere.

He feels uncomfortable at the festivities of his classmates, as well as at parties in deepest Harlem, the centre of African-American life in New York. His identity crisis means that the problems between him and his white girlfriend Charlotte (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) are growing.

"I imagined that his time at Columbia must have been a crucial phase of his life," says the film’s director Vikram Gandhi. "Barry" shows a young Obama in search of his black roots. He writes letters to his father in Kenya but he dies before he can visit him.

In the film Barry’s friends call him "invisible." Indeed Gandhi found it hard to find information about Obama’s time at Columbia: "He was like a ghost."

Few people who were at the university at that time remembered him. Obama wrote in his autobiography about the period: "I was too comfortable in my solitude, it was the safest place I knew."

And so "Barry" shows an Obama whom we really don’t know. He doesn’t yet have the gravitas of the presidential candidate who inspired many with his "Yes, we can" slogan nor the charm and self-confidence that won over millions of voters.

Instead the movie shows an insecure, inconspicuous young man. "I had no idea what I would do with my life," as Obama later wrote about this time.

But that’s what gives this Netflix production its interest. With great sensitivity, Terrell has mastered the challenge of playing someone very well known while Taylor-Joy – whose Charlotte is a composite of several students Obama knew at the time – also gives a strong performance.

"Barry" has little action but it develops into a profound search for the origins of Barack Obama, a man who would later change America. According to Gandhi, it shows "how certain experiences can pave the way for an ordinary person to become extraordinary one day." (DPA)