City So Real

It’s a noble, heartfelt, and eye-opening look at the American city, matching the scope of Frederick Wiseman’s recent scoping of a similarly fractious Boston in “City Hall,” but giving it more of a warmly human pulse.

An essential five-part documentary from the great nonfiction filmmaker Steve James.

It’s a tapestry of life in Chicago that is entertaining in its individual moments but gains much more power when considered as a whole. ... The ambition of “City So Real” is remarkable, but it’s fulfilled through James’ deep fascination with humanity. No one is better at revealing the truth that there is a fascinating story around every corner of every city, and he equalizes everyone in Chicago.

Chicago, you should watch it. Everybody everywhere else, you should watch it, too. Seek out “City So Real” either to confirm your suspicions about how this city functions, or to affirm your idea of Chicago as the brash epitome of American character, from politics on down. Or up. ... The grand, sprawling five-episode docuseries complicates and humanizes your idea of the place.

The reality is that I'd have happily watched 10 hours of City So Real, which never drags and never makes bureaucracy or procedure look boring.

“City So Real” carries its weight effortlessly. Responsible to the historic moment yet enthralling in a minute-by-minute capacity few unscripted or scripted TV series can earn, Steve James’ latest is a flat-out must-see.

The weight of so many of the country’s problems, all wrapped up in a single city, is palpable, but the filmmakers also leave space for lightness. ... James doesn’t offer solutions to the problems presented—how could he?—but lets the dark and the light exist alongside one another.

A beautiful tapestry of a series, an operatic cornucopia that makes something wonderful of our best and less best American selves.

There are corners of this series in which the filmmaker's sweeping ambition to encapsulate as much of Chicago in all its beauty and blight gets the better of him. On the other hand, by apportioning as much grandeur and artistry to the green weeds in blank lots in poorer neighborhoods as he does to the grand architecture of Gold Coast area buildings, James creates in this series the feel of an honest romantic letter to a difficult mate.

Viewers may find a more polished take on this place, and on the famous and everyday folks who live here. They will not find one more insightful, exhilarating, or lovelier.

A sweeping, radically curious five-part series. ... It’s a complicated mural of civic life that lets its subjects speak for themselves and resists reducing their concerns to bumper stickers. ... A final episode that might have seemed like a postscript instead brings the series’s threads together.

It’s an impressionistic, peripatetic tour of Chicago in the very present tense that moves fluidly among the clashing, contradictory hierarchies, neighborhoods and institutions that don’t just struggle, but seem to be in a constant state of competition. ... Mr. James has the wisdom to follow his instinct for where a story, or even a scene, is going to go.

“City So Real” feels like a sprawling, epic, Tom Wolfe nonfiction book caught on film, as it captures stories huge and small, showcases the astonishing beauty and the heartbreaking blight of Chicago and introduces a number of memorable real-life “characters,” in multiple storylines set against the big-picture backdrops.