Director: Corey Davis
Writer: Corey Davis
Running time: 2hrs 14mins
When someone tells you in your teens, that your first breakup won’t be the end of the world – or that it probably won’t even rank in your top 100 traumas by the end of your life – you think it’s patronising. Perhaps it is. But the longer you live, the longer you realise they were right, and see just how trivial those moments were.
Corey Davis is 23 years old, and has recently graduated from university. He has churned out seven short films since 2018, and has just graduated from university. It would be easy to lay into the pomposity of making a 134-minute autobiographical documentary out of that career – but I was young and self-absorbed once as well. I’ve fallen into the trap of seeing my own mediocre travails as part of some profound journey, just as Davis has done – and many others still will do.
In a few years, I hope he is willing to cut himself some slack when he looks back on this particular venture. I hope he has moved on to bigger and better things – and is making a steady living from making movies. And I also hope that he has grown out of the small-minded classism, which I am much less inclined to give him a pass for than his inflated sense of self-importance.
The Corey Davis Evolution Story (presumably Davis could not decide which description was most suitably grandiose for this particular epic) begins with a lengthy description of his early years. The first hour covers everything from Davis’ birth, to the many hats he wore during high school: entertainer, dancer, social campaigner, news anchor, local celebrity, the list seems endless.
Born in a small town, he grew up just as the camera-phone led to the proliferation of movies into every waking moment of our lives. From the very beginning, he was imagining ways to tell stories with moving images – including an ill-fated foray into humorous Facebook videos. Monotonously delivering jokes from milk-cartons into the digital void, Davis soon realised this wasn’t for him, and announced he had “retired” from comedy – presumably to the local equivalent of Statler and Waldorf guffawing that they didn’t realise he’d taken it up in the first place.
In a moment of disarming candour, Davis looks back on this chapter in his life – sitting on the couch from which he delivers the entirety of his two-hour sermon – and admits he was a poor comedian, and those old videos make him cringe. For a moment, the film threatens to become something interesting – as it immediately wrong-foots an audience expecting another video where a content creator doubles down on their shoddy work, and dismisses any criticism as coming from “haters”.
We had been primed to ask, “Why the hell should I care? Why is he making a documentary about himself like he’s lived some great career in Hollywood?” But suddenly, the rug has been pulled from beneath our feet – and we are left to confront our own biases as to who gets to talk about themselves on film. Why do some stories, some lives, ‘matter’, while others are not deemed worthy of a movie?
If the movie were trimmed down to a single hour (or preferably less), and if it were to consist of a self-aware filmmaker critiquing his early missteps in a bid to learn where to go from here – or to prime audiences to ask questions about the way they see some lives as being more worth of narrative empathy than others – that might have really justified the hefty title bestowed upon it. But sadly, that is not what happens. Instead, Davis makes the unfortunate decision to determinedly reconstruct all the barriers he just broke down. Moving on from his first failures in comedy, he says, he chose to instead focus on dancing. Why did he decide to do this?
Describing the culture of his school, where the majority of his fellow students were Black, he notes that fights often broke out, and he was determined to show “not all of us are from the ghetto”. Davis, who has given us a great deal of insight into his decidedly safe, middle class family life, doubles down by stating his goal became to show that “a small percentage” of Black people in America want to “co-exist peacefully”.
Having successfully frittered away any good will he had built up in the film’s opening sequence, he continues to play up to racist tropes by insisting he is different, because he doesn’t “want to be a stereotype”, or a “wannabe gangster”. (Incidentally, pointing out that some Black people are middle class, and as biased against poorer members of their community as white supremacists is a tactic which is as historically ineffective as it is ethically grotesque.) In order to demonstrate his safe middle class values, and encourage others to better themselves out of being stereotypes, he says he chose to start dancing in the cafeteria at lunch time – where fights used to regularly break out.
While this crusade is initially featured on a local news segment (which he claims led to him being applauded through the school’s corridors by teens who apparently couldn’t get enough of the latest WTOC Good News segment), he becomes despondent when interest in his performances wanes, and crowds begin to become rowdy.
He is keen to reiterate that the only person in control of your life is you, and that you can choose to change your situation at any moment – a view which conveniently writes off the experiences of anyone who is “from the ghetto”, as unworthy of empathy or even a hearing (neither of which he provides to the people he is speaking about). So, the only reason his dancing didn’t lead to his fellow students becoming reformed, peaceful and academically gifted individuals, is because they chose to be stereotypes, and definitely not because any external factors in wider society could be at play.
When the gifted auteur finally decides to put his own needs before his community, escaping his nowhere town with “nothing there for me”, he heads to university near Atlanta, with a view of building his skills and network, and to prepare for a career in which he makes it big. Heralding this triumphant shift, Davis plays a segment from a speech by Jesse Jackson, in which he declares I am SOMEBODY – in Davis’ case presumably he means it as “I’m just from a small town with no appreciation of the arts, but I am SOMEBODY” whereas Jackson prefaced it with “I may be poor… I may be on welfare… I may have made mistakes…” – somewhat at loggerheads with the classism deployed by Davis earlier.
This sets in motion the circumstance for something so tone-deaf that it almost feels like a slow-burning joke – and if, indeed, it was meant that way, I would encourage Davis to give that career a second go. University is the antithesis of his earlier life, he says, with Davis finally surrounded by creative and intelligent people who want to make art, who want to better themselves, just like him. But just as he says things are looking up, Davis elicits a Shining-style scare from audiences, as an ominous title card booms onto screen: 2020. Vying with Easton Davy (the artist who walked past 9/11 on the way to work, and only realised when he saw it on the news later) for title of world’s most oblivious man, Davis somehow had no idea about the pandemic until he found himself trapped in his hometown, having visited family in March.
Unable to return to university, he was forced to miss out on all the glorious opportunities that he had planned to take advantage of – including a year of studying abroad in South Korea, and a number of collaborative film projects with his new friends. The punchline, then, was that despite all his best intentions, his individual drive to pull himself up by the bootstraps, Davis is unable to walk the talk. It turns out, simply wanting something is not enough to achieve it – and often, economic and social factors will get in the way of even the highest-minded self-actualisation. Perhaps you might owe those alleged deplorables at your school an apology?
After admitting essentially this was the first kind of hardship he had ever experienced, you might think Davis is about to deliver such an epiphany in the film’s closing segment. But sadly, it seems the irony is utterly lost on him – and he doubles down on his worldview. Of course he didn’t get the opportunity to make a decent film during lockdown; he couldn’t build an extensive network amid social distancing; and he can’t find work in the creative sector after graduating – that’s the pandemic’s fault, and the pandemic impacted everyone, so it’s just par for the course. It’s not at all the same thing as someone being born into a world where they don’t know where the next meal is coming from, feeling like they have to constantly fight for their space and respect; because poverty doesn’t impact everyone. Or at least, not Corey Davis™.
His use of a text-to-speech programme to narrate the connective segments of this documentary add to the tone-deaf nature of proceedings. In pursuit of his grand vision, Davis has enabled the creative sector to further erode the rights of other workers (however sterile and lifeless the AI is here) – a process which will in turn mean there is less work for him in the creative sector.
This leads to a climactic speech, which comes across as overtly tragi-comic. Davis is right to note that he alone is not at fault for being unable to obtain work in the post-Covid economy, but is for some reason incapable of learning from his own experience, to see those supposed lost causes in his community as human beings, at the whims of the same social pressures as he is. The saddest part of this, is that this inevitably turns in on himself. Davis declares he loves what he does (through gritted teeth, in an angry final monologue that doesn’t exactly scream love), and alludes to the idea that he will succeed because he is going to redouble his efforts – again, success boils down to wanting something, so in his view, if he hasn’t succeeded, he hasn’t wanted it enough – before declaring, “I’m coming up, and I’m not stopping for anyone”.
I really do hope he’s right about that. But if he continues to view himself as an island, and to overlook the systemic issues that will present his dreams with barriers – as well as the need to become part of a collective or community to overcome them – I fear the sequel to The Corey Davis Evolution Story will end up being a soft-reboot, rather than a continuation of this story.
We all like to think we are destined for greatness when we are young. Many of us let that belief lead us to say and do things which we later look back on with embarrassment – and we should all have a right to learn and grow from that process. Corey Davis will one day have lived a long and interesting life, and I hope when he has, he can look back on this misadventure with good humour. But more importantly, by then, I hope that he will have learned to have a good deal more empathy for the classmates he was all too happy to write off as a “barbaric” underclass, or people across wider society who he finds wanting of his own lofty standards.