When Nate Parker's passion project gained awards and rapturous applause at the Sundance Film Festival, it thrust him into a spotlight which has not been entirely beneficial to the film itself. While an artist should be separable from their art, there is a reason why Parker's past actions are mentioned so often in reviews of the film, as he's taken the writer-director-star role, and the content of the film sometimes makes the rape charges hard to ignore. If The Birth of a Nation were a great film, it might have been able to rise above these issues, and while it's well-shot and acted, Parker's severe limitations as a first-time director are consistently apparent, and his conventional, hagiographic script struggles to truly dig deep into its subject matter. There are surface pleasures here, but whether they're enough to satisfy will likely vary wildly.
