Raising Dion

We’re looking forward to Raising Dion, an upcoming Netflix film about a boy with superpowers and produced by Michael B. Jordan. Via Variety:

The show has a clear sense of itself and the story it wants to tell, one whose ideas, which eventually come to encompass, and to artfully express in a teacherly way, such seemingly difficult-to-convey notions as bodily autonomy and toxic masculinity. (It’s to “Raising Dion’s” credit that such ideas, as rendered here, feel like an adventurous spin on the superhero story rather than rotely applied; such infusion of political thought at every level of a familiar genre takes real work). The show’s telling of its story, on the other hand, shares “Stranger Things’s” feeling of innocent adventurism and kid’s-eye perspective but lacks some of its crispness. Alisha Wainwright is a gifted actress, and her character Nicole’s struggle to stay herself while enduring widowhood and being a single mother to an extraordinary kid is real. But a plotline about her challenge keeping a job while keeping alive her love for dance feels like an obvious example of the sort of bloat that can infuse streaming shows, and a plotline that ultimately serves this story or its likeliest audience little.

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