I’m not fully acquainted with the filmography of John Sayles, but I’m pretty sure THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET is an outlier. It was 1984, so Sayles had already had his Roger Corman/exploitation beginnings (writing PIRANHA, BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, ALLIGATOR, THE HOWLING and THE CHALLENGE) and moved into directing his indie dramas (RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS 7, LIANNA, BABY IT’S YOU). Here he makes his only ever sci-fi movie as a director, but it’s not all that commercial. Supposedly the story came to him in a dream.

The most sci-fi part is the opening cockpit lights and bleeping sounds as the mysterious extra-terrestrial played by Joe Morton (CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER) crash lands on earth. He loses a leg in the process and hops around in an abandoned church until he somehow grows it back. Since he’s missing one shoe we see that his feet have three big clawed toes, like a dragon, but otherwise he looks human. In the city he finds a replacement shoe in a garbage can and I wondered if he understood that was garbage or if he just assumed Earth has public shoe dispensers.

With his feet now protected he walks around, largely ignored, like a homeless earthling, and tries to figure out how things work. He sees someone buy pears from a market and tries to repeat their actions using money he takes out of the register. After the cashier goes outside and yells for a nearby beat cop there are quick cuts of a badge and gun – the alien recognizing what they are, and making a run for it. Cops must be the same everywhere in the galaxy. A little later he sees a statue of the crucifixion in a store window, then a cop harassing Giancarlo Esposito (around the time of playing Cellmate #2 in TRADING PLACES) across the street. So he gets what kind of place this is, what kind of stuff goes on here.

He doesn’t talk, but he can understand any language. He also has the ability to heal people and even electronics with his hands. We learn that when he’s in a Harlem bar and fixes their long-broken video game. One of the older regulars at the place, Smokey (Leonard Jackson, BASQUIAT), is more impressed that he seemed to sense the spot where somebody once got shot in there. “Man sat on the death seat, and he felt it.”

The bar is one of the main locations of the movie, and there’s a stretch there long enough to start feeling like it’s a play. I love the hangout vibe here with the smattering of daily customers and pretty much the coolest bartender you could ever have – Odell, played by Steve motherfuckin James. He’d already been in around a dozen movies, but almost all of them were bit parts. Maybe THE EXTERMINATOR, THE SOLDIER and VIGILANTE would’ve been his biggest. Here he does show off his biceps and has a little fighting part (and he’s credited as co-stunt-coordinator) but it’s kind of a novelty to see him playing a role that’s more based on his charisma, not to mention lets him be The Man instead of the overqualified sidekick. Also, he’s the first one to call the alien “brother.”

Another regular, Sam (Tom Wright, MARKED FOR DEATH), is a social worker, and Odell convinces him to help the Brother, getting a friend named Randy (Caroline Aaron, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS) to let him stay at her place. Sam also brings him to an arcade called Playland where, to the shock of the owner (Michael Mantell, CA$H), he quickly fixes the entire “pinball graveyard” of broken machines. This is where we really start to see how people will just open up to him, tell them their whole life stories. It could be a joke about how much people will blabber if given the chance, but I think his linguistic abilities make him sort of a super powered listener.

A great scene is when Playland’s top player (Liane Curtis, CRITTERS 2: THE MAIN COURSE) talks to him. Either her name is Ace or that’s just what it says on the back of her cool jacket. The Brother’s co-worker Hector (Jamie Tirelli, GIRLFIGHT) says “She can play them all day on one quarter, if she don’t get bored. Wears the machines down.” She confides in him that playing the games, and living life, is dull for her, because she thinks too fast. “It’s like everything in the world is going slow motion, except you.” So as a gift to her he makes the game go so fast it’s actually challenging for her. “That was fantastic!” she says.

The Brother learns to fit in. Sort of. He walks around eating a head of lettuce, sees a dog leashed to a parking meter and lets him go. He sees flyers for a singer named Malverne Davis (Dee Dee Bridgewater) and falls in love with the picture. Buys her LP, throws the record away, keeps the cover. He goes to a club to see her, ends up in her hotel room with her, and it actually goes well! Not bad for a beginner.

A pair of strange men in matching black outfits are looking for the Brother. They’re played by Sayles himself and David Strathairn (A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN). They come into the bar showing a photo of the Brother, claiming to work for Immigration, calling him “an illegal alien.” The video game obsessed regular Fly (Daryl Edwards, THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL’S OUT) interjects “So what?” and tells them off. Later the Brother’s co-worker at Playland, Hector (Jamie Tirelli, THE COWBOY WAY) won’t speak English to them, so they ask to speak to his supervisor. Of course.

The immigration theme is in there from the beginning, when he lands on Ellis Island. I’d say it’s even hinted at in the steel drum inflected score by Mason Daring. I like that everybody instantly sees through the anti-immigrant shit. When the men in black hassle Randy looking for the Brother she says, “Immigration? Give me a break. We had a kid overdose right downstairs last night, and you’re pestering people about whether they got some piece of paper that says they’re legal?” She also says “You want to know my opinion? My opinion is that you people just made up this immigration scam, just to keep people under your thumb.”

That scene comes immediately after one where the Brother visits an exhibit about the history of slavery in America, and we realize that he has escaped something similar on his planet. It’s like I’ve been saying. When I was coming up, it was understood by all that the people obsessed with stopping immigration are KKK motherfuckers. Or at the very least assholes, like bar regular Walter (Bill Cobbs, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS), who keeps talking about Haitians having diseases and Polynesians having leprosy. There are of course legitimate debates to be had about specifics of immigration policy, but in general if somebody is preoccupied with stopping immigration there’s a reason for it and it’s not that they’re a caring person with good ideas about how to improve the world.

There’s another pair of goofy white men (Chip Mitchell and David Babcock) who show up at the bar, thankfully less sinister. These two are from Indiana, in town “for the self-actualization conference,” and are terrified when they realize they got off the wrong subway stop and are lost in Harlem. They timidly walk into the bar and get this response when they order:

But they talk to the Brother and after several beers they’re very happy, one of them saying, “I mean, if people would sit down and talk like this more often— Communication, that’s what it’s all about.” A great line because, yeah, that’s true, but he hasn’t learned anything about the Brother’s perspective on things, and doesn’t seem to notice.

The Brother is all about understanding other people’s experiences, though. When he finds someone dead from an overdose he takes the needle out of his arm and tries some himself. In the last stretch he takes it upon himself to find out who’s behind the drug problem in the neighborhood, starting with the spectacular method of pulling one eyeball out and hiding it in a potted plant as a spycam. When he puts it back in he scans through the footage. The eyeball was even able to zoom and pan. He uses his gifts to hotwire a car. He traces the heroin to a white real estate asshole (Edward Baran), corners him in his office, silently interrogates him and forces him to literally see the results of his actions.

That’s the closest it ever comes to seeming like a straight up genre movie, but it never overtakes the weird hang out movie we’ve been watching. There’s also a scene where the guys in the bar try to fight the men in black to protect the Brother, but it seems more like a joke than a serious action scene. The Brother escapes by doing a flip while the two older gentlemen use football strategies to block for him.

Obviously this is somewhat of a love letter to New York, and there’s some good time capsule footage of him walking around. Unsurprisingly there’s a good theater marquee:

So we know RISKY BUSINESS, MR. MOM, NIGHT MARES (?), VACATION, PRIVATE SCHOOL, and STRANGE INVADERS were playing. Important information. According to my research, the Criterion Center opened in 1936. It had been converted to a six screen multiplex a few years before this. In 2000 it was gutted and turned into a huge Toys R Us which closed in 2015. Now it appears to be a Gap.

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET was an early film for some notable people. It’s the first professional movie for cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson, fresh off of Spike Lee’s thesis film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. For the most part you wouldn’t necessarily know this was the same guy, but check out how he shot this little dance part:

Cue “Fight the Power.”

Fisher Stevens (after THE BURNING, before THE FLAMINGO KID and MY SCIENCE PROJECT) has a scene doing a card trick on the subway. Reggie Rock Bythewood (EXTERMINATOR 2, VAMPIRE’S KISS) plays Rickey, one of the junkies in the building who try to rob the Brother. Sayles inspired him to move into filmmaking; he later wrote GET ON THE BUS, rewrote NOTORIOUS, and wrote and directed BIKER BOYZ. His wife is Gina Prince-Bythewood, director of LOVE & BASKETBALL, THE OLD GUARD and THE WOMAN KING.

I’ve long seen an odd connection between THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET and THE TERMINATOR. Obviously Morton played Miles Dyson in T2, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s just that they’re both these low budget movies from directors who came up working for Roger Corman, with an otherworldly character arriving in a city, trying not to be discovered, while chased by sinister forces from his world. And they were released about a week apart! Of course they also are completely different types of movies, but that’s what makes them a cool pairing. Too bad Sayles never made a B2.