SUNDANCE ’20 REVIEW

SUNDANCE 2020: Well-Intentioned Slam Poetry Misfire ‘SUMMERTIME’ Has Zero Commercial Appeal

Name: Summertime review
Item: Summertime
Rating: 2.3
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · January 24, 2020

SUNDANCE 2020: Well-Intentioned Slam Poetry Misfire ‘SUMMERTIME’ Has Zero Commercial Appeal

Where to watch: Rent or buy on digital where available (updated October 2026)Rent or buy on Amazon · Buy on Blu-ray/4KAs an Amazon Associate, Silver Screen Riot earns from qualifying purchases.

With Blindspotting, new director Carlos López Estrada emerged onto the scene with a distinct and fiery voice, delivering a knockout primal scream of a film that laced the power of spoken word into a poignant and brilliantly-acted Oakland gentrification satire. In his sophomore feature Summertime, Estrada has bungled almost everything that worked so well in his first outing, delivering an amateurish variety show that leans much too heavily on disparate young voices within Los Angeles slam poetry community coalescing into a Crash-like ensemble of random interconnectivity.

Estrada’s failed experiment seems to want to be a lyrical dissection of millennial angst in the city of stars, each character in the mix seeking out their slice of the spotlight in a generation where everyone either has a “brand” or is slowing turning into said “brand”, but the movie veers wildly towards unconnected twee melodrama without anchoring the “plot” (if you can even call it that) in worthwhile characters. There’s a Yelp critic searching the city for a cheeseburger, two aspiring street-level hip hop dudes, a girl rollerblading while playing an acoustic guitar, a couple trying to rap battle their way through relationship troubles and a graffiti “artist” with zero tagging skills named Jacob. There’s more of them (30 total, each extended a co-writers credit) that occupy the narrative but I’ve forgotten them already.

The intersectionality of the characters and their slim stories leaves much to be desired, Estrada’s film just kind of drifting from one player to the next without providing any structural backbone to tie any of this together. The result is sluggish and dream-like. Possibly nightmarish for the unsuspecting viewer. If slam poetry is not your bread and butter, this film is to avoided at all costs; when all is said and done Estrada has done little more than shoot a collection of live spoken word sessions, untethered from plot, character motivation, story structure or any of the other aspects usually involved with a movie. To say it has no commercial appeal is at once obvious and a fair warning signal for any coming into it expecting more than a slam poetry montage.

It doesn’t help that Estrada’s cast is mostly young and inexperienced and it shows. Mightily at times. While there is something to be said about his obvious admiration for this highly diverse cadre of dreamers and poets, it’s impossible to ignore the vast leap backwards from working with proven talent in Daveed Diggs. Some performers flounder more than others while others still very much earn their brief flash in the spotlight, but with such a bloated cast, there’s never really a chance to connect with any individual, Summertime relying on tropes and cliches to do much characterization heavy lifting.

Blindspotting works as well as it does because when the characters finally burst into a soul-bearing free-verse diatribe, the audience has already come to know, understand and empathize with that character. Here, it’s all freestyle climax, no point.

As time wears on, Summertime becomes increasingly problematic by virtue of how hard it is at times to take seriously. This is a movie that takes the voice of Yelp video reviewers at face value (but still fails to realize you cannot rate establishments with half stars) as if it is some certifiable art form. I’m hardly one to stand against criticism but Summertime seems itself to misunderstand the value of criticism. In doing so, perhaps he attempts to erect a critical force field around the obvious big swing that is Summertime but it doesn’t work. In attempting to be both culturally youthful and in-the-know and formally avant-garde, Estrada’s undeniable burst of enthusiasm reveals an inner nothingness. A random stream of conscious miasma of jumbled wordplay that was nearly 0% my jam.

Even the visual components of Summertime are lackluster and lame, Estrada using new age mediums like Instagram filters and selfie videos to poor effect. The lack of visual style is surprising on the heels of Blindspotting and feels like a major step in the wrong direction: away from filmmaking and towards content proprietor.

CONCLUSION: Director Carlos López Estrada tries to further refine his unique voice to hugely disappointing effect. In his music and verse-oriented intersection of LA poets and storytellers, Estrada’s ‘Summertime’ feels amateurish and unfinished, a collision of unrefined niceties. A major step backwards for a promising filmmaker, this second feature is a red mark on the rap sheet.