Michael B. Jordan’s nuanced and sensitive portrayal of Oscar Grant III helps make Fruitvale Station a cinematic tour de force.

Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old father, was shot and killed by transit police officer Johannes Mehserle in the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2009. Grant, who had been detained after a brawl on the subway, was unarmed, restrained and lying facedown on the floor of Bay Area Rapid Transit’s Fruitvale Station when Mehserle calmly removed his firearm from its holster and fired a single shot into Grant’s back.

Grant died seven hours later in an Oakland, Calif., hospital. His death was ruled a homicide, and Mehserle was charged with first-degree murder. Mehserle’s defense claimed he mistook his gun for his Taser, and he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He served 11 months in prison. According to one witness, Grant’s last words were, “You shot me! I got a 4-year-old daughter!”

Fruitvale Station, a dramatized account of Grant’s last day, opens with footage of Grant’s shooting, which multiple bystanders recorded on cellphones and video cameras. It’s the most blood-curdling sequence this side of The Act of Killing, made all the more horrifying by its reality and immediacy. Whatever Grant’s past sins, whatever Mehserle’s justifications, it’s clear that something tragic and terrible occurred at Fruitvale Station in the first hours of 2009.

The fatal police shooting of an unarmed black father in the typically tolerant and progressive San Francisco Bay Area after President Obama’s election came as a shock to many.

“It affected me deeply. It affected a lot of people deeply. People protested immediately; people rioted immediately; people shut down their businesses in solidarity,” said Ryan Coogler, a Bay Area native and Fruitvale Station’s writer and director. “As an artist, I immediately wanted to do something about it, to say something about it. After [Grant’s] character got pulled in a lot of different directions during the trial, I wanted to get to the heart of who he was.”

The project’s origin dates back to when Coogler was still in film school. He pitched the idea for a film about Grant at a meeting between classes with actor-producer Forest Whitaker, who was impressed and backed the project with his production company, Significant Productions.

The next step was to meet with Grant’s family members, with whom Coogler conducted extensive interviews. They were initially hesitant about the project, but the fact that the trial had already put them in the spotlight and that Coogler — himself a young black man from just outside Oakland — came from a similar background as Grant assuaged their doubts. Grant’s real-life mother has a small role in the film.

The complexities of Grant’s character are at the heart of the film. Coogler refuses to either sanctify or vilify him; he’s drawn entirely in shades of gray. He’s both a loving father and an ex-con who spent the previous New Year’s in San Quentin State Prison, far from his daughter. He cares for his girlfriend but also cheats on her. He makes an honest attempt to go straight but sometimes his temper and the temptation of easy money in a neighborhood where jobs are hard to come by get the better of him.

“I was interested in looking at him through his relationships, through the people who were most important to him,” Coogler said. “I think that’s where everybody’s identity exists.

“When he sold drugs and went to prison, he affected his mom, he affected his daughter, he affected his girl. When we meet him on this day, he’s still feeling the repercussions, and he’s still actively doing some of these things. He’s smoking weed; he’s still selling weed. I think it would be wrong to ignore these things, but at the same time, I think people see themselves in somebody’s flaws just as much as the good things.”

Played with heartbreaking conviction by actor Michael B. Jordan (Hotel Noir) — best known for his work on The Wire and Friday Night Lights — Grant is presented as a flawed man whose shot at redemption is cut short by tragedy that strikes like a bolt from the blue. What’s significant about him isn’t that he was a good person or a bad person — it’s that he was a person, period, defined by a tangle of hopes and flaws and loves. The life he led wasn’t perfect, but it was a life, and there is much more pain in its absence than its presence.

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