‘Love, Brooklyn’ Shows the Romance in Moving On [Review]

Racheal Abigail Holder’s ‘Love, Brooklyn’ finds the warmth in the small moments between moving forward and holding back.

Love, Brooklyn (2025), Greenwich Entertainment

I’ve never been the type of person to love a romance film, especially a romantic comedy. Rom-coms (and pseudo rom-coms) tend to fall into a pattern of embarrassment as comedy: messy people handling messy situations in the worst ways possible for the sake of a laugh. Personally, this kind of humor has always made me want to hide behind my hands more than laugh out loud, skip to the next scene just to escape whatever painfully awkward thing is happening onscreen.

To my great surprise, Racheal Abigail Holder’s Love, Brooklyn never made me feel like that.

The film follows journalist Roger (André Holland) as he clumsily navigates both drama at work and his messy-at-best romantic situationships with his ex-turned-close-friend, art dealer Casey (Nicole Beharie), and newer fling, entrepreneurial widow Nicole (DeWanda Wise).

While I’ve spent a lot of my life very publicly disparaging love triangles, Love, Brooklyn employs the trope successfully because of its simple intimacies and the way it really sinks its teeth into its characters, refusing to let them fall into tropes and stereotypes in a genre that so often demands they do. Their drama is messy and awkward and dreadfully embarrassing without ever feeling sensationalized. There was something very compelling about the intimacy and softness between all the actors, a simplicity to their performances that makes them feel lived-in and almost embarrassingly relatable, even in their most dramatic moments.

The main driving factor behind this success was the depth of the characters; it’s clear that they’re all deeply defined and thoughtfully constructed, a fact well demonstrated through their every word of dialogue, every expression on their faces. In a Q&A following the movie, Holder spoke about how her background in playwrighting helped her to craft this story: how she designated a significant amount of time before filming to write the characters’ biographies and backgrounds along with full stories and scenes of important moments and memories that we never get to see on the screen.

This attention to interiority truly comes through in every aspect of the final product, where immaturity, impulsivity, and growth alike feel like natural evolutions and progressions of the characters; they simply feel like people, flaws and strengths in all of their glory.

The film’s plot is loose, sometimes drifting, like it’s in a sort of limbo, much like Roger himself, who bikes through a city that he can’t quite decide if he loves anymore. He isn’t someone who likes to be alone with his thoughts or with the hollowness inside that he wants to fill with something, though he doesn’t seem to know what; the way this emotion permeates the screen is one of the film’s greatest strengths. What does it mean to not want to go back, but not want to move forward either? To refuse to let go, but also long for something new?

Love, Brooklyn (2025), Greenwich Entertainment

Limbo is typically associated with being stuck, being trapped, but Roger doesn’t seem to hate the feeling. Whether it be with the weight of past love had and lost on his shoulders or the emptiness of his once lively city breezing past him, in a lot of ways, until it all falls apart, he thrives in this space, this limbo. He leans on whichever woman wants him at whichever moment, finds joy and finds security and finds love somewhere when he can’t get it somewhere else, eternally putting off the article he doesn’t want to write until the thought of it disappears into background static.

It does make him selfish (and quite unlikeable at many points), but it’s clear that it never comes from a place of apathy or even anger, but rather a sort of clinging: to the past, to anything good, to a belief that something good can last forever, a point succinctly summarized toward the beginning of the film as Roger and Casey discuss Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “Sodom and Gomorrah”. Rather than a bad person or a brooding, emotional romantic archetype, he’s someone who’s stuck in a sort of malaise he can’t crawl his way out of alone.

Roger is more like Casey than either of them would like to admit. They’re stuck in a game of push-and-pull with varying levels of self-awareness. They spend their time goofing around the city together, reenacting paintings in museums and carrying their electric banter to the park, where they orbit and bounce off of each other with the sort of ease that can only come from spending so much time with someone you sort of mix into each other. They start and end superficial relationships because of this unceasing draw they have to one another, which is clearly as destructive as it is magnetic.

But where Roger lives in avoidance, Casey deals in denial; she ignores phone calls, skips events, curtails hard conversations, and clings to her gallery space even as the pressures of gentrification make it less and less sustainable, forever holding on tight, not realizing the salt has already begun slipping through her fingers. She’s played with a spellbinding warmth by Beharie, the standout of the film, who captures the multi-faceted nature of her headstrong but deeply emotional character with such practiced ease it seems as if it must only be natural.

Nicole, despite grieving the death of her husband, is much more honest with herself and those around her than both Roger and Casey, and she is also, seemingly antithetically, kinder, too. Her grief stings and permeates her life, but she also continues pushing forward, making a new future for herself in the way Roger and Casey seem afraid to. She knows what she wants, whether it be about her relationship with Roger, her daughter’s upbringing, her career, or anything else. The duality of her character is a refreshing change, especially in a genre (and an industry) where Black female love interests often wind up being one-dimensional. Nicole is kind, soft, honest, and driven all at once without ever feeling like she contradicts herself.

What’s most interesting about the love triangle between these three characters is that it also seems to function as a metaphor, albeit a complicated one. Whether intentionally or not, Love, Brooklyn invites parallels between Roger’s divided romantic attachments and his ambivalence about Brooklyn itself. He spends much of the film avoiding his article about the city’s “evolution,” preferring its past, a split mirrored in his relationships with Nicole and Casey respectively; Nicole is a “new” Brooklyn, still full of life and loss, but undeniably different, where Casey is more of a nostalgic ghost, familiarity through rose-tinted glasses that it hurts to hold onto.

As a result, it’s tempting to read the film as pro-gentrification in its suggestion that change of this nature is inevitable, perhaps even for the better. At the same time, that simply doesn’t feel like the right way to summarize the film, and in the Q&A, both the Holder and Holland said this was in no way their intention. Perhaps existing as one of the lingering issues from the roots of Paul Zimmerman’s original script, these deeper themes don’t get much time to develop, overshadowed by the complicated interpersonal dynamics and seemingly existing just to muddy the waters on what the movie is trying to say. At times, the socioeconomic undercurrents feel like thematic garnish, an issue that was sort of but not quite resolved before production began.

Love, Brooklyn (2025), Greenwich Entertainment

What kept me engaged despite some of these undercooked themes was the audience. This is a film that most certainly benefits from being seen communally, practically custom designed for you to lean over and murmur to a friend about whatever horrible mistake Roger is making in his love life this time. At my screening, people laughed, groaned, and covered their faces over and over, and it made a feeling that I usually hate having — awkwardness, embarrassment, plain and simple cringeworthiness — somehow soft and enjoyable just through the act of sharing it with a room full of strangers.

I’m thankful to Love, Brooklyn for that feeling, and it makes it all the more unfair that it took so long to find distribution. After premiering at Sundance back in January, it got picked up by Greenwich Entertainment in May for a theatrical release at the beginning of September. During the Q&A portion of the screening, Holland and Holder spoke about the challenges with both getting the film produced and distributed, with the most common “feedback” being that there wasn’t an audience for a film like this.

This feedback is unwarranted and verifiably incorrect, if the enthusiastic response from the audience at my screening was any indication. There is an audience for Black-centered stories like this, especially ones with such intricately developed characters, and even more so when they shine brighter when watched in a theater with strangers who slowly become part of the experience.

All in all, even with its flaws, Love, Brooklyn knows what kind of movie it is and executes its goals with care, pulling in new themes and ideas without feeling the need to castigate or in any way look down on films that came before; it doesn’t try to change the formula of a romance but instead fills it with something more important: real, modern characters, made with intention, that the audience can find bits and pieces of themselves in.

Be sure to check it out in theaters; it has a limited release in New York on August 29th with a wider, nationwide release on September 5th.