Based on a true story, the film Skin raises social issues about the skinhead community. Skin is adapted from the biography of a man named Bryon Widner or better known as Babs (Jamie Bell).
The story begins with young Babs who are invited to take to the streets. Then, he was appointed to become a member in the skinhead community. The skinhead community has a leader named Fred (Bill Camp) and Shareen (Vera Farmiga). During Babs grew up there, he only found violence and hatred towards other races.
This of course made his life difficult and unhappy. He always felt a very bad life all this time. But, what can I do. These two skinhead leaders kept him alive, however they did not let Babs live alone. Babs then decided to throw away habits in this skinhead environment. He tried to transform into a normal person.
Good luck befell Babs, because soon he met Julie Price (Daniel Macdonald) who later became his girlfriend. Julie is willing to help Babs to get out of this environment. In addition, a black man who is an activist, Daryle Jenkins (Mike Colter) also intends to help Babs.
The director, Guy Nattiv — whose sketchy, partly fictionalized screenplay feels both eventful and unsatisfyingly hurried — Bell’s isn’t the only fine performance here. Vera Farmiga and Bill Camp are creepily credible as the group’s leaders and ersatz parents, while Mike Colter’s quietly intelligent portrayal of Daryle Lamont Jenkins, the black anti-fascist activist who helped Widner find a way out, helps balance the movie’s bursts of melodrama. Games Online dan Offline
But it’s Widner’s relationship with Julie (Danielle Macdonald, tough and smart), a wary single mother of three daughters, that gives “Skin” its emotional core and Widner his motivation. In their scenes together, and in Widner’s gradual winning-over of the girls, the movie finds a warmth and naturalness so divergent from the toxic bonds of his white-power family that escape seems the only logical choice.
In development well before current events made it especially timely, “Skin” was shot in upstate New York by the French cinematographer Arnaud Potier, who uses a handheld camera to create blanched, gray-white images that leap with urgency. Nattiv, who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, was inspired by Bill Brummel’s 2011 documentary, “Erasing Hate,” and his movie works best in its quieter moments. Only then do we see Widner coming to understand that the allegiances branded on his skin are no longer a proud costume, but a pictorial prison.