-By Chris Barsanti

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In Red Hook Summer, star Clarke Peters spends a lot of time mopping his brow. Theoretically, that’s because the film is set in the middle of a hot Brooklyn summer. It soon becomes difficult, though, to imagine Peters is sweating for any reason besides the fact that he’s working overtime trying to breathe some life and purpose into this directionless work from the possibly past-his-prime Spike Lee. In the grace and power of Peters’ performance, Lee has created one of his most memorable characters. Sadly, it’s nearly all for naught.

Lee’s first problem is putting the bulk of his film in the hands of a thinly written and fairly contradictory sketch of a character, Flik. Played by Jules Brown with barely a scintilla of emotion, Flik is a 13-year-old boy we first see being driven into the Red Hook projects, filming everything with his tablet. (“iI’s an iPad2,” he insists on telling everyone.) He’s been exiled for the summer to the apartment of his grandfather “Bishop” Enoch Rouse (Peters), a hellfire preacher at a small, falling-down chapel who wants to provide a serious counterweight to the godless culture his vegan suburbanite grandchild has been exposed to.

Except for a few repeated mannerisms and a clumsy flirtation with neighborhood girl Chazz (Tony Lysaith), Flik barely seems to exist on the screen. He flatly resists all of Enoch’s come-to-Jesus entreaties and seems miserably unhappy in Red Hook, insisting that both his mother and Enoch hate him (though in one scene where he’s video-chatting with his mother, he clearly evinces a strongly emotional bond, a contradiction of mood that goes beyond mere childish whimsy). Next to him, Chazz is much more vivid but hardly in a good way, with Lysaith shouting nearly every line in the same monotone. In several scenes, her well-beyond-realistic dialogue—from the rickety script that Lee co-wrote with his Miracle at St. Anna scenarist James McBride—comes off less like conversation than some faintly embarrassing one-woman performance-art piece.

Between Brown and Lysaith’s fumble-footed summer courtship, Peters angles into each of his scenes with a commanding presence sorely missing just about everywhere else in this film. While Lee certainly relies too much on the stage-trained Peters to hold his sketchy scenario together, the scenes in which Rouse holds forth in front of his congregation—purple vestments aswirl, the hope of love and the promise of an eternal reward lighting his face like a beacon—are for a short time some of the most vital cinema that Lee has ever produced; and that’s before Peters breaks into one of his gospel numbers.

Even with Peters’ energy, though, the film starts to show serious strain about a half-hour in, when it becomes clear that no story will truly present itself. A more committed Lee can get by without a strong plot, as he did in Crooklyn, whose subplot about a young Brooklyn boy being sent to stay with his Atlanta relatives makes it the clear touchstone here. But where that film at least had wildly outré visuals and a kinetic sense of place, Red Hook Summer is so indifferently shot and slapped together that they seem like they came from different filmmakers.

Lee contents himself here with clowning around, inserting a cameo of himself as a much, much older version of Mookie from Do the Right Thing, as well as a couple of appearances by alums from Peters’ show “The Wire” (one of which comes off as less clever than pandering). Some pointed references to the neighborhood’s increasing gentrification (there is one hard-to-forget shot of a massive docked cruise ship towering like a mountain over the area’s low-slung houses) and a too-late and somewhat desperate-seeming third-act revelation aside, it’s hard to think of the movie as anything but an amateurish toss-off by a filmmaker who should know better.