The First Lady had a pretty special first date with the man who would go on to become both her husband and the president of the United States — and now, Michelle and Barack Obama’s romance is about to get its own movie.
Entitled “Southside With You,” the indie film will follow the young couple on their first date in Chicago’s South Side.
AVClub: Chicago, 1989. A warm August day. In the shadow of Altgeld Gardens, in a church on the South Side, a lanky, charismatic, 28-year-old lawyer addresses a small group of community organizers. His name is Barack Obama, and from the minute Parker Sawyers, the actor playing him, drops his first “listen,” we believe the illusion—the feeling that we’ve managed, somehow, to fall backward in time to witness an early speech, a miniature “yes we can” pep talk from the man who will be president. And yet for as much as he evokes the famous figure he’s portraying, Sawyers doesn’t approach the speech like a preemptive State Of The Union address. His Obama, still two decades from the Oval, is a young man first, a future leader second. All he wants at the moment is to inspire some local activists. Oh, and maybe also to impress someone specific in the audience: a smart and very serious co-worker named Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter), who he’s persuaded to spend the day with him.
Collider
Going into Southside with You, writer/director Richard Tanne’s drama about the first date between Barack and Michelle Obama, I was curious to find out why this film exists. There’s nothing remotely scandalous or dramatic about the first date between our nation’s First Couple, so what’s the need to chronicle the event in Before Sunrise-esque fashion?
Joblo
The basic template of two young people walking and talking their way around a city, slowly falling in (or out) or love as they do so, has been done before, perhaps most beautifully in Richard Linklater’s classic Before Sunrise. But the rather simple and romantic premise takes on a whole different layer of meaning when those two people happen to be Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson, later to become the President and First Lady of the United States. That’s the idea behind Southside with You, an intimate look at the first date of two people – both ambitious and guarded in their own way – who would go on to make history together.
I was almost unsure of what tags to add to this article, but then I realized there are none for something this unusual.
Who the hell want's to see this?