Adekoje Captures Truth on Film in ‘Knockaround Kids’

Listen to this article

Working in a group home at night, while teaching during the day, John Adekoje knew the experiences he was going through would someday make a great movie. All he needed to do was find the right people to bring the story in his head to life on the big screen.

“I was looking for actors who could portray total honesty in the film” Adekoje said in an interview with Color Magazine. “And it’s probably the hardest thing to get right because you have to give the kind of performance that doesn’t feel like acting. The audience needs to believe in you as the character, not as someone pretending to be someone they’re not.”

To find the right actors to play both the adults and the kids in his movie, the director, a member of the Theatre Faculty at the Boston Arts Academy, took an unusual approach to the casting process. “I would go up to students in the school and ask them to read a line from the script,” he explained. “I just wanted to see how they acted spontaneously, without going through the artificial pressure of an official audition. I wanted to see them before they pretended to be somebody else.

“I did the same thing for the adult roles in the film outside of the school, asking people I met on the street or at the subway to say a line to me,” Adekoje added. “It was a crazy idea, but I think it got me the cast I was looking for.”

People watching the finished film, Knockaround Kids, will have to agree. The dramatic story of a group of troubled kids caught between the Massachusetts social welfare system and the dysfunctional ways of those ordered to protect them feels more real than any documentary possible could, pulling the audience in to the story with an unrelenting authenticity rarely captured in celluloid.

“We were lucky enough to get about three months to rehearse before we actually began shooting, and it was amazing for me, as the director, to watch these generally inexperienced actors not only find the character as written in the page but to embrace them and make them their own,” Adekoje said. “I was a little apprehensive things would fall apart once the crew showed up; things can change when you go from rehearsal to actually saying ‘action’ on the set, but they all stayed focused and on point.”

After he finished shooting the film, Adekoje faced what he called the biggest challenge of the entire project – taking the raw footage and shaping it into a story. “Finding the right balance was the tricky part,” he explained. “It’s easy to do a story like this and be too heavy handed in pointing blame or to try and find a happy ending that satisfies everybody. That’s just not how life is. It’s messy and complicated. A lot of people who have seen the movie have told me they wished it had a happier ending or at least had the kind of clean resolution they could walk away happy from. I didn’t want that. I want them to leave the movie feeling unresolved about the story and about the reality it represents. I want them to think about what they’ve seen long after they’ve left the building.”

Knockaround Kids is now available to watch on demand in Google Play and Amazon. For more information, as well as to provide feedback on the film to the director, visit knockaroundkids.com.