Twin sisters hunt down a wayward dad in the inspired ‘Is God Is’

Playwright Aleshea Harris makes a bold cinematic debut with the screen adaptation of her Obie Award-winning play “Is God Is,” a harrowing and beautiful slice of surrealist neo-noir. Her fable depicts twin sisters on a revenge road trip, seeking to right the wrongs of their early childhood at the behest of their estranged mother and find some catharsis along the way.

Tony Award-winning actress Kara Young co-stars as Racine, the mouthy, rough-and-tough twin. Mallori Johnson plays her sister Anaia: shy, retreating and “emotional,” a descriptor that lands like an insult on her psyche. Harris introduces us to the girls in a sepia flashback, their small bodies clad in matching dresses, one head resting on the other’s shoulder. They only have each other.

When we catch up with them in the present day, the twins live a life perfectly in sync, their movements in rhythm, their telepathic communication expressed on-screen in typewriter-font subtitles. Harris also shows us the burn scars that ripple up Racine’s arm and across Anaia’s face, textured skin that makes strangers blanch, to which Racine lashes out defensively. They live in a silo for two, sharing their pain, icing their scars. They’re psychically connected, even if they are two different sides of the same coin, Racine angry, Anaia scared.

But the twins are floored and delighted to receive a letter from their long-lost mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), who is ailing and covered in burns from the same attack that scarred their bodies. She describes for them the night their father (Sterling K. Brown) doused her in gasoline and lit a match, and dispatches her girls on a bloody mission to get revenge on a man they’ve never met.

Thus begins their quest down a blood-red road into their father’s heart of darkness, which takes them from what seems to be the Deep South to the Western desert. Everything in this screen world is heightened, slightly off-kilter but entirely plausible (with the exception being Ruby’s wretched body, still burning after all these years). It’s filled with wacky characters and wild coincidences but the backdrop of abuse is all too real.

The girls follow a trail of tears to Divine (Erika Alexander), a charismatic preacher still in the carnal thrall of her time with their father. Her address book leads them to Chuck Hall (Mykelti Williamson), a cowboy lawyer who lost his tongue to him, but still has lots to say and warnings to give. And then they find their inverse mirror image: a pair of twin boys (Xavier Mills and Justen Ross) happily ensconced in a lavish home with a pool, their fearful mother (Janelle Monáe) dripping in luxury clothing and jewelry but trying to make a break from her gilded cage.

“Is God Is” isn’t the kind of rollicking free-for-all that will have you cheering in the theater. Rather, it’s a classic noir in that the entire world Harris presents feels infected with violence and corruption, careening toward an inevitable, bleakly tragic ending.

But the journey there is richly rendered through Harris’ poetic sensibility. It’s always fascinating to see how theater talents adapt to cinematic storytelling, and Harris has a keen eye for striking visuals (captured by cinematographer Alexander Dynan) and a sharp sense of rhythm, expressed in the edit by Jay Rabinowitz. The percussive score by Joseph Shirley and Moses Sumney underlines this and gives the whole film an eerie, curious atmosphere, lending to a sense of unreality.

But it’s Young who demands full attention. Her fiery, entrancing performance blazes across the screen and is a breakout film role for the acclaimed stage actor. While Johnson holds the emotional center, Young is riveting as the twin who burns too bright for this world, raging against the force of evil that is her father, played by Brown in a genuinely terrifying register that we’ve never seen from him before.

Equally enchanting and disturbing in its unique blend of magical and social realism, “Is God Is” is a highly stylish and daring announcement of a new cinematic talent in Harris, who has been allowed to fully express a vision that’s uncompromising and entirely hers. It’s rare that an artist is given such freedom to create a singular work, rarer still to witness the birth of a new voice ringing with such clarity on screen.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

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