Sundance review: Stellar performance by Nicole Beharie provides uplift 'Miss Juneteenth' needs

‘Miss Juneteenth’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 103 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, noon, Rose Wagner (Salt Lake City); Sunday, Jan. 26, 9 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Monday, Jan. 27, noon, PC Library (Park City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, noon, Temple (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 3:30 p.m., Eccles (Park City).

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There’s a grand tradition of independent movies about plucky strivers, fending off poverty and juggling the bills to make their American dream come true — and such films work, as writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ “Miss Juneteenth” does, if the details and the actor at the center are perfect.

Turquoise Jones, played beautifully by Nicole Beharie, won the pageant title of Miss Juneteenth back in 2004, but never got to make good on the boost it’s supposed to provide young black women. Turquoise wants her own about-to-be 15-year-old daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), to enter the contest, to win the full-ride scholarship to a historically black college or university and make the escape from Fort Worth, Texas, that Turquoise didn’t.

To make that happen, Turquoise has to navigate a financial minefield. She works double shifts at the barbecue joint owned by the avuncular Wayman (Marcus Mauldin). She wheedles money out of her unreliable estranged husband, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson). She foregoes the power bill to pay Kai’s pageant fees, and so on.

Along the way, Turquoise dismisses Kai’s interest in trying out for the school dance/drill team. She also tries to counter her daughter’s lack of enthusiasm for Miss Juneteenth — a pageant named for the holiday among African Americans marking when word first arrived in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation, two years after Lincoln signed it.

Peoples has an eye for the details of the Jones family’s life, scraping by on her wits while trying to touch the upper class life the pageant represents. That split is emphasized when Wayman snorts at Turquoise’s evocation of the American dream. “There ain’t no American dream for black people — we just try to hang on to what we have.”

Without Beharie at the movie’s center, though, all of Peoples’ details would be for naught. Beharie (familiar, to some, for her role on the series “Sleepy Hollow”) captures Turquoise’s optimism that she can make her life better, the tenacity that she will do it without a man, and the frustration at the obstacles in her way. Beharie overcomes those obstacles, and makes “Miss Juneteenth” a winner.