"The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete" opens with a compression of plight so packed it might set a record. When we first meet Mister (Skylan Brooks), a 14-year-old boy living with his drug-addled mother (Jennifer Hudson) in a squalid apartment, he's flunked out of eight grade, been denied groceries on his mom's welfare card, and had to confront her desperate prostitution done in order to pay for their next meal. These events unfold back-to-back with a convincing depiction of their clichéd truths; but what "Notorious" director George Tillman Jr. and screenwriter Michael Starrbury paint as compelling context for their ensuing tale of two ambitious kids — stranded in New York over a scorching summer — reads instead as a meandering emotional barrage of hardship, however deepened by a pair of lively performances at its core. In the film, Tillman Jr. carves out a corner of New York's lower class, largely black neighborhoods, and infuses it with a tone shifting constantly from poetic...
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