'Luce' review: Outstanding drama of a student who's too good to be true

Things are never what they seem in Julius Onah’s " Luce," a tightly wound fable of modern morality and identity, adapted from a play by J.C. Lee, who co-wrote the film’s script with Onah.
The centrifugal force at the center of this stunning drama is the brilliant young actor Kelvin Harrison Jr., who plays high school golden boy Luce Edgar. When we first encounter him, he’s delivering a slick speech at an assembly, each pause and smile perfectly timed. It’s political poise. We want desperately to believe in it, because Luce has a tragic background. His parents, Amy and Peter (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth), adopted him as a kid from war-torn Eritrea. There’s a suggestion as to his violent childhood and the therapy and recovery he’s gone through, but the specifics are never laid out.
There’s only one person who doesn’t buy what Luce is selling: his history teacher Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), who holds her black and minority students to a different standard. He chafes against her identity politics. Tension turns to suspicion and all-out war when Wilson confronts Amy with a troubling discovery she’s made searching Luce’s locker, presented alongside a paper espousing the beliefs of radical political philosopher Frantz Fanon. The fallout from this meeting, along with the miscommunication, secrets, lies and misplaced assumptions that go along with it, precipitate a turn of events that spirals out of control.
Harrison delivers a tour de force performance that nearly eclipses those of his co-stars. As Luce, his expressions smoothly vacillate like comedy and tragedy Commedia dell’Arte masks, sliding into place for whatever he needs to be at that moment in time, performing and code-switching according to whatever any audience needs him to be.
"Luce" pushes us to figure the truth out for ourselves, but never makes it easy, in fact confounding what we thought to be true along the way. Onah crafts a film where we never know who or what to believe. And though we crave the truth, much like the real world, it’s never freely given.