4/5 stars

With a story driven by beautifully restrained emotions and conversations steeped in philosophical queries about the meaning and significance of art, the Franco-Japanese co-production Nagi Notes combines the best of the two cinematic worlds it was born out of.

Playing in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, Nagi Notes is based on Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata’s Tokyo Notes, a play revolving around 20 characters sitting in a museum hall talking about their lives while a devastating war rages in faraway Europe.

In Fukada’s very loose adaptation of the 1994 play – which retains only two of the original characters and removes the spatial confines in Hirata’s Beckett-ish narrative – war and its imitations are also omnipresent.

On television, they see the devastation in Ukraine; up close, they contend with military trucks rumbling past their homes and the constant boom of regular drills taking place at a nearby training camp.

After watching his mother perform in a production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at Compton Community College when he was 9 years old, Anthony Anderson knew appearing on stage would be his life’s work. Over the next handful of years, he enrolled in programs across Los Angeles to achieve that dream. Then, one morning after finishing a class at the Southern California Regional Occupational Center in Torrance, Anderson saw a Post-It note on a bulletin board that caught his attention. The note informed aspiring artists about a newly formed arts school. To be admitted, they had to submit an audition tape.

“I ripped it off the board, and I brought it home to my mother, and I said, ‘Mom, if I can get into this school, can I go here?’” Anderson says. “She said, ‘If you can get into that, yes.’”

Months later, Anderson received a letter informing him that he had been accepted into the inaugural class at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

Founded in 1984 and opening its doors to students in 1985, Los Angeles County High School for the Arts is located on the campus of Cal State L.A. It was established to provide students (currently 550) with conservatory-level arts training and college-prep academics within the public education system. LACHSA isn’t associated with LAUSD; instead, it partners with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which provides funding to support it.

“I felt it to be very important that I was in an environment where other students had the same passion as I did for the arts, in particular, theater,” Anderson says. “Being around other students who had the same passion and drive that I had as an artist was very influential.”

Over the years, LACHSA has featured a who’s who of alumni across various disciplines, including musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Haim, actors Jenna Elfman and Belissa Escobedo, and visual artists Robert Vargas, Tomashi Jackson and Kehinde Wiley. For the past seven years, the school has been ranked as the top public high school for the arts.

While the school’s accolades focus on the arts, LACHSA also aims to give its students experiences that extend beyond the program. Days are structured so that students take academic classes in the morning and arts in the afternoon. With this format, they meet and get to know classmates from other disciplines.

Former “SNL” cast member Taran Killam points out that this also promotes the school’s social and economic diversity, acting as a mini-college experience.

“It’s such a melting pot, but you have this beautiful, focused bonding,” he says. “It’s a rare thing for kids to know, but LACHSA students are ambitious. It’s very unifying when your background is so disparate and so diverse. It’s what makes it special, and you can’t get this experience in a traditional school.”

Lara Raj attended several arts-focused high schools as she moved during her childhood. With that in mind, the member of the girl group Katseye cites LACHSA as having a major influence on her artistic development. During her time at LACHSA, Raj took music, fashion and acting classes, and says its music tech class was her favorite. There, she learned how to create beats and write songs.

“I developed my songwriting and fell in love with it through those classes,” Raj says. “I was excited to go to school every day. And I hate school.”

Before attending LACHSA, singer-actor Josh Groban didn’t know a school specializing in the arts was an option. After bouncing around schools and realizing he needed a different education to express himself equally academically and artistically, he ended up at LACHSA. There, he found like-minded, artistically inclined outsiders.

Josh Groban, a former student of LACHSA, credits the institution with helping him find his voice.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“I was a kid who didn’t quite know how to fit in,” Groban says. “Then at [LACHSA], I was surrounded by other students who, I think, didn’t know how to fit in either. We were there for the same reasons, which is that we felt like we needed the nourishment of the arts and being able to express ourselves on a daily basis.”

Half of LACHSA’s funding is provided by the state, with the rest provided by the LACHSA Foundation, a registered 501(c) (3). According to its executive director, Trena Pitchford, the foundation has invested $1 million each school year.

“People always ask me when I tell them I went to LaGuardia and to LACHSA if they were private schools,” Raj says. “I tell them it was created by people who are passionate about the arts and want to inspire kids.”

“There’s a part of LACHSA that I think is a discovery point for a lot of Los Angeles County, and even the nation,” Pitchford says. “There’s so much opportunity for the school, and they’re doing it on a limited budget. What would happen if they were fully funded? What would happen if the foundation had a $40 million endowment? That would fully sustain what they’re doing right now.”

LACHSA students posing in front of the entrance to the Greek Theatre

(Courtesy of LACHSA)

LACHSAPalooza, the culmination of the foundation’s two-year fundraising campaign to celebrate the first 40 years of LACHSA, will take place at the Greek Theatre on May 30. There, student artists will perform alongside Ozomatli, Jon B., April Showers and more. From a fundraising standpoint, the foundation has high hopes of raising $2.5 million.

“We have both annual goals in terms of investment as well as sort of big visions, big dreams of where we think LACHSA could go for the next 40 years,” Pitchford says. “We also hope to put LACHSA on the national stage.’

The honorees for the night are the late Pat Bass, LACHSA’s gospel choir director, retiring LACHSA theater department chair Lois Hunter, and Jerry Freedman, a longtime social studies teacher at the school.

For Anderson, who is serving as the night’s host, seeing Freedman recognized is very meaningful.

“He was there from the school’s beginning,” Anderson says. “He was there when I started, and he’s still there and is still beloved by the students 40-plus years later. I’m looking forward to honoring him.”

As an arts-based school in the long-standing entertainment capital of the U.S., LACHSA can educate and enable the next generation of artists to discover their voices in the backyards of production companies, studios and record labels.

“The freedom that a LACHSA student gets on the campus to discover who they are is exciting,” Pritchard says. “It’s very innovative, very creative, and it’s forward thinking, future forward. It’s an exciting and thrilling place to be.”

Alumni agree. Without LACHSA and, in turn, a focused public arts education, pursuing a career in the arts would have been more difficult and more costly.

“It helps develop souls to be fully fledged human beings who feel like they can go off into the world and be the best versions of themselves,” Groban says. “We all felt like we were free to be who we wanted to be.”

“Specialty-focused high schools like LACHSA, be it arts or any other topic deserving of protection, because it is a gathering place for exceptionally talented, ambitious, driven kids,” Killam says. “And aren’t those the kind of people we want to be cultivating in society?”

Fraternal twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) have always had only each other. After a childhood bouncing from one abusive foster home to the next, the two have settled into a life together where sisterhood always comes first. Both sisters have burns on their bodies, but Anaia’s facial scars make her stand out. And if someone bothers Anaia, Racine is there to fight for her.

We see this at the very beginning of Aleshea Harris’ debut feature, Is God Is. In a black and white flashback, the young twins sit peacefully on a bench together, until some kids walk by calling Anaia ugly. Racine quickly rises, beats the bullies, and then returns to sit next to her sister. In the present day, the twins get fired when Racine defends her sister at work. They are both newly unemployed when Racine tells Anaia that she’s been corresponding with their estranged mother (Vivica A. Fox). Soon enough, the twins pack their things and get on the road, driving their very cinematic classic car down the backroads of the American South.

Once they arrive, their mother gives them a simple mission: kill their father. In flashback, we learn that they were once a family until their mother got a restraining order against their father (Sterling K. Brown). One night, he violates the restraining order and comes into the house, hoping to embrace his wife. But when she doesn’t reciprocate, he pushes her into the bathtub, pours lighter fluid on her and sets her body ablaze. He also brings his twin daughters into the bathroom to see their mother burn — their scars are the result of their desperate attempts to save their mother.

Meanwhile, their father walks out of their life entirely. And though their mother survives the burns, she couldn’t take care of them. Now that her daughters are grown and she is near death, she can’t rest easy until the man who tried to kill her is dead. Unfortunately, the three women have no idea where to find the wayward patriarch. 

Harris’ screenplay follows a classic “hero’s journey” template, with the twins setting off on the open road, meeting a variety of eccentric characters in the search for their enigmatic father. The first stop is a church run by the charismatic Divine (Erika Alexander), who bills herself as a healer. The twins also meet their half-brother Ezekiel (Josiah Cross), who becomes a problem later. Thankfully, Divine has kept all their father’s things, and they steal his address book, leading them to his former lawyer, Chuck (Mykelti Williamson).

Eventually, the sisters make it to their father’s home, meet his new wife (Janelle Monae), their twin brothers (Xavier Mills, Justen Ross) and, eventually, the man himself. Racine and Anaia’s journey mirrors that of The Bride’s in Quentin Tarantino’s two-part epic Kill Bill, as they follow a bloody trail of revenge before the final showdown. Fox’s presence in the movie is another reminder; in Tarantino’s film, Fox is slain by The Bride (Uma Thurman) and she tells her daughter that she may seek her out for revenge when she’s older. Racine and Anaia, acting as spiritual successors, pursue revenge with their own Bill, this one Black and even more mysterious. 

Is God Is is not just the story of one Black family; it stands as an almost cosmic example of the dysfunction inherent in so many Black American families. Black men, weighed down by white exploitation in the world, come home to families that bear the brunt of their outside frustrations. Late in the film, when Anaia asks her father why he tried to kill her mother, his response is simple: She wouldn’t let me hold her. Never mind that she had a restraining order against him and legally he should not have been there; even after having all those years to think about his actions, he continues to blame his ex-wife. There is this prevalent idea in the Black community that a woman’s role is to calmly support the Black men in her life, setting aside her own feelings and safety. Brown’s patriarch is the embodiment of that unbalanced relationship, causing chaos and expecting more love and forgiveness in return. 

The “God” in the title is Fox, the name bestowed upon her for giving life to our heroines. Racine and Anaia are more than just sisters in this narrative — they represent all the justifiably angry Black girls who deserved more than the world gave them. Harris adapted Is God Is from her play of the same name, and the theatrical spirit lives on in the film through the rhythm and repetition of the dialogue. The central performances are strong, with Brown perfectly embodying a sinister, otherworldly image of masculinity run amok.

It’s a shame, then, that the film around these impressive actors is visually flat. The South we see in Is God Is is a desolate, underpopulated landscape — too neat and quiet for a story that should feel larger. All the words sound right and everyone is in place, but Is God Is feels like a film just short of greatness.