When we first meet Mike (Cannon) he's being given his orders. In 96 hours his unit ships out to Iraq. Until then, they're on Thanksgiving leave. On the bus to his hometown of Bakersfield, California, he meets Cristina (Melonie Diaz), who, within seconds of finding out he's a Marine, says she hopes he isn't going to Iraq. Not wanting to ruin a good thing, he lies, and never really stops even when he gets home to see his family and friends.
What follows is more of a slice-of-life piece than any polemic on the horrors of the home front. We meet Mike's friends, including his best bud Jake (Matt O'Leary), who claims to be in landscaping but is making the kind of money befitting something shadier. We meet his broken family, including his mother, Donna (April Grace), her live-in boyfriend, Dale (Tom Sizemore), and their daughter, Tricia (Erica Gluck), as well as his estranged father, Eddie (Chi McBride), who scrapes together a living when not chasing down Mike's druggie older brother Aaron (Herman Wilkins).
As Mike's romance with Cristina blossoms, we see an unadorned portrait of the world he inhabited before enlisting, and it becomes clear that a tour in Iraq might not be any less daunting than the prospect of growing old in Bakersfield, and might be more meaningful.
Director Neil Abramson lets this landscape unfold organically with pseudo-documentary camerawork. The only directorial conceit he applies is a countdown occasionally reminding us how many hours remain in Mike's leave. Eric Schmid's screenplay deftly avoids melodrama, opting for simple, realistic moments over hyper-dramatic flourishes or earth-shattering epiphanies.
The performances are uniformly solid. Cannon flows smoothly from his native genre of comedy to drama, underplaying the turmoil brewing beneath a likeable exterior. O'Leary depicts Jake's resentment/envy cocktail with passion. And Jay Hernandez has a memorable cameo as an Iraq War vet who seems more upset about leaving his comrades behind than losing his leg.
Part of what makes Abramson's storytelling so effective is that he knows how little we really need to know in order to fill in the blanks. We never really find out what Jake is into, but his gun cache, wads of money and, most importantly, feeling judged by Mike without Mike saying a word tell us all we need to know.
American Son has nothing groundbreaking to tell us about the Iraq War, or any war, for that matter, except that enlisting is often the only choice many young people see if they grow up in a poor, or just hopeless, neighborhood. It's more interested in us getting to know this small enclave of characters at a turning point in one of their lives. As a result, it ends up being one of the strongest entries in the growing list of films about Iraq even though, ultimately, it probably doesn't belong on that list at all.
