Kevin Hooks is a pretty damn good high school basketball player with dreams of becoming a pro player. This dream is heavily encouraged by his dad Moses Gunn, a former football player left to raise Hooks on his own when his wife ran out on him. He operates a neighborhood bar, drinks heavily and lives vicariously through his son.
Hooks has a crush on Irene Cara. It's reciprocated. They start seeing each other, but can only do it in secret since he's black and she's Puerto Rican.
This is an odd film. There's almost too much going on it. There's the love story. There's Hooks' ambitions to play sports. There's his dad's frustrated life. There's a small time pimp played by Hooks' dad Robert Hooks, who is tasked with finding heroin to sell to some generic mafia thugs. This last plot line quite unexpectedly takes over the film, and the fairly sweet character-driven love story becomes a crime flick.
It's far from a bad film. Hooks is not a great actor, but Cara is much better, and she kind of pulls him up to her level in their scenes together. It feels of a piece with films like "Cooley High" that attempted to pull the Blaxploitation craze into new areas ... stories about people living normal lives in the inner cities. That makes it all the stranger that it reverts to fairly typical crime action in the last act.
Sadly it was Gordon Parks Jr.'s last completed film. He died in a plane crash during the filming of his next one.
