Toe To Toe

Racial land mines, cultural differences and adolescent girl turmoil get the indie mash-up treatment in writer-producer-director Emily Abt's drama " Toe to Toe," a movie whose emotional messiness is sturdier than its storytelling. Set primarily at a racially mixed Washington, D.C., prep school, Abt focuses on the queasy friendship between studious black teenager Tosha (Sonequa Martin), who lives in cramped inner city quarters with four generations of her family (including Leslie Uggams as a no-nonsense grandma), and white, privileged, and self-destructively promiscuous Jesse (a heartbreaking Louisa Krause). They're both star players on the lacrosse team -- for Tosha, it's also her hoped-for Princeton scholarship ticket -- but they clash over the attentions of a sweet-faced Lebanese classmate (Silvestre Rasuk) with hip-hop-DJ dreams. Martin's charismatic dignity in conveying Tosha's academic and cultural pressures make for a fetching heroine, and she's a stark counterpoint to Krause's Jesse, a fast-fading flower whose aggressive sexual indiscriminateness (since her globe-trotting mother, played by Ally Walker, ignores her) is at times difficult to watch. Unfortunately, Abt undercuts the roiling power of her pained strivers with over-earnest dialogue and tidying-up plotting. But for good stretches, "Toe to Toe" has an engaging frankness about youthful liberty as both a weighty armor and a dangerously alluring escape hatch.
Da The Los Angeles Times, 12 marzo 2010