Great Movie!

Rating: 9/10 (20 February 2019)

This story has been done to death with movies such as "The Help" and "Race" but what pulls it through are the Characters and the sense of humor employed. Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali and Linda Cardellini are great in this movie. Their chemistry is believable and it's great to see how they play off eachother. They're the yin and yang to eachother in both background, mannerisms and class. Viggo plays a working class italian-american bouncer named Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga who reluctantly agrees to chauffeur a classical pianist named Dr. Don Shirley on his tour in the south during the 60's to make some side money. Along the way they both deal with injustices around the country and in the process begin to see eye to eye and develop a mutual respect for eachother.
While successful, Shirley's also a victim of his own fame as his marriage failed due to his lifestyle and the isolation he feels from by both sides of society and his driver Tony doesn't care what people think about him and as such comes off as a sloppy thug to others. While they have biases of eachother they slowly began to lesson after sharing experiences of prejudice themselves. Probably a good example is when they get arrested by 2 racist cops after getting pulled over for driving past a sundown town which leads to Viggo punching one of the cops for insulting him.
As they soldier on, Viggo writes daily to his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and with the help of Shirley his penmanship improves and leaves his wife touched. The reason I gave this movie 9/10 stars is because like I said earlier this story's been done before and while they're usually good the story's basically the same: The black character needs a white person to help them get by. However, the acting is what pulls it through and makes it a great movie. Take it for what it's worth and see for yourself.