“Fruitvale Station” touches a nerve in metro Atlanta

In a darkened movie theater, little pools of light. Down-turned faces — intent, ghostly, separate. Not candles, but a vigil perhaps, nevertheless. A vigil lit by cellphones, a vigil for a crazy, needless death, a death made infamous by onlookers armed — and dangerous — with cellphones.

And that’s how “Fruitvale Station” begins, with actual cellphone-camera footage of the actual death of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old father, son and petty criminal trying, fitfully, to grow into a man.

Not a hero, not a thug, an essentially good-hearted muddle of a human being, screwed-up and sweet, full of love and lies and, most of all, fear, fear and more fear. Grant died on New Year’s Day, 2009, shot by a transit cop responding to a fight on a subway train in Oakland, Calif.

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And you’re right there, the whole scene heaving and pitching as the camera-wielder struggles for footing amid the yelling crowd on the garishly lit platform. And even though everybody in the theater presumably knows how it ends, that scrum between four young black men and three not-black transit cops, the absurdly small little pop that marks the fatal shot still brings a collective flinch and a whimper.

Trayvon Martin. OK, there, it’s said. You knew it was coming. Now it’s done. But Trayvon Martin is not the point. That’s another movie, an equally important movie, because that’s another life, an equally important — and messy and contradictory — life. That’s the point.

Demetra Ford brought her 16-year-old stepdaughter to Midtown Art Cinema to see “Fruitvale Station” on Friday, opening day. She told the teen not to read anything about it in advance, she said, hoping to jolt her out of her little world of “girlfriend-boyfriend drama.”

As a defense lawyer, Ford deals with kids in trouble every day. Except for one bullet (the cop said he meant to use his taser rather than his gun), she’s known “quite a few” Oscar Grants, she said.

More often than not, if cellphone images are involved in their cases, the images help to establish their guilt, she said with a rueful smile.

But she’s also seen kids beaten down and abused for no good reason, juveniles subjected to sexual assault by guards in juvenile lockups, kids so used to being questioned by cops that when one approaches, they automatically turn their pockets inside out.

Angela Bourrage, a Cobb County teacher, said the film brought her to tears.

“I think the movie depicts what’s going on in America right now,” said Bourrage, who caught the very first screening at Atlantic Station. “It’s similar cases like this where men are getting shot by police officers in Brooklyn,” she said. “Or getting shot in Milwaukee, where I’m from, and questions are asked after the fact.”

She said she wants to tell her friends, colleagues and little cousin to come and see the film. “This is something that everybody needs to see.”

Bahati Perkins Devane is a native of Oakland. Although she wasn’t living there at the time, she remembers when the shooting happened.

She said she has been followed before by the police for no reason. “It made me feel violated,” she said.

The 37-year-old paralegal, who now lives in Atlanta, said people need to come together, regardless of race or ethnicity, to give kids strong male influences and establish trust with law enforcement. “There are good officers out there, but they are outnumbered,” she said.

Chris Askew, host of “Unwrapped” and a DJ on WRFG radio, said the film showed just how wide the communication gap can be.

The transit officers, he said, “had a predetermined notion of what someone was like, what they were doing and what was on their minds and hearts.”

Askew, of Lithonia, was once taken out of a car at gunpoint. “That’s not uncommon for black men from a certain generation,” he said.

Terrence Johnson moved to Atlanta two weeks ago to be near his son and to escape the stresses of life in New York. At 57, he said, he’s outlived most of his friends. “Most of the people I came up with didn’t make it,” he said.

“I’ve been stabbed, shot,” he said, looking relaxed, prosperous and dapper in the warm light of a Midtown afternoon.

“I’ve been arrested and put in handcuffs for no reason. Some police take they badge and use it for they power.”

“People need to see this (movie),” he said. “They need to understand that it doesn’t matter what color you are.”

Sitting on the sidewalk nearby, Richard Cornell ate a hamburger and drank from a bottle of water. He hadn’t seen the movie, but, as a homeless man on the streets of Atlanta, he had some thoughts about police and judges and the harshness thereof.

But more urgently he wanted to talk about Life.

People drive themselves crazy in the quest for power and security, he said, when “God and family are all that matter.”

“Unload that extra stuff,” he counseled, “or it will overload you.”

Argue about death, by all means. But you can’t argue with death. Death is small and ugly and stupid, and — as Cornell might have said — wherever fear flourishes, death smiles at its elbow.

And that’s the point of “Fruitvale Station” — that every life is maddening and beautiful, pathetic and precious, and we can argue ourselves blue, but we’ll never reduce it to This or That or The Other. Not truly.

And that’s the worst of it, the biggest tragedy: Every life is bigger than our categories, and when we lose sight of the life, the real life, in a thicket of categories, it’s lost twice over.