RZA spent thirteen years trying to get this film made. Thirteen years. I think about that a lot while watching it not because the film feels labored, exactly, but because you can feel the weight of that time in it, all that accumulated fury looking for the right shape and not entirely finding one.
The town is called Karensville, Ohio. That’s the name Diggs chose. I laughed when I saw it, then felt bad for laughing, then decided the feeling bad was probably the point.
A kid named Lonnie opens the film. Red varsity jacket, wrong place, wrong skin. He gets beaten, taken, killed. His organs get harvested by a surgeon who, we’re told later, has a wife and a kid. That detail, the wife, the kid is the film’s first genuinely cold idea, and Diggs doesn’t make a meal of it. He just says it and moves on. I wished he’d done more of that.
Into Karensville comes Unique, a military veteran played by Shameik Moore, looking for something like a home. He’s got a cousin, Ramsee (RJ Cyler), whose warmth is so immediate and undefended that you start worrying for him around the fifteen-minute mark and don’t stop. Against them: a sheriff drawn from the Foghorn Leghorn school of villainy, a bail bondsman named Brutus. Brutus and a gang of baseball-bat enthusiasts led by a preening boss and his albino lieutenant. These characters are cartoons. I think Diggs knows they’re cartoons. I’m not entirely sure he meant them to be, which is a different problem.
Here’s what’s strange about One Spoon of Chocolate: the things that work, really work. Unique and Ramsee in a car, bouncing in their seats, singing along to ODB’s “Brooklyn Zoo.” Diggs produced most of that album in his own basement. That’s not a fun fact, that’s autobiography, and the scene knows it. Something real passes between those two characters in about forty-five seconds that the rest of the film spends two hours trying to recreate.
Moore is good throughout. Better than the script deserves, honestly. There’s an image near the end Unique wiping blood from a wall mural of the American flag that Moore plays without indicating, without underlining, just doing the thing and letting you catch it. The film has thoughts about Black patriotism, about men who served a country that didn’t hold up its end of the deal. It keeps almost saying them. It keeps moving on before it does.
The first three quarters drag. I’ll be honest: there are stretches where I was watching the clock in a way I rarely do, waiting for the film to become what I could feel it wanted to be. The antagonists give you nothing to grip. The dramatic architecture doesn’t tighten the way it should. Diggs has said he wrote a hundred pages of what he sees as a two-hundred-page story. You feel the missing hundred as absence scenes that should cost something and don’t quite, stakes that should terrify and don’t quite.
Then the climax arrives and something unlocks. The action choreography is clean and purposeful. The geography is clear. The violence earns what the buildup couldn’t. And there’s a Biggie cue “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)” over a training montage that would feel cheap from anyone else and doesn’t feel cheap here, because this is Diggs’s music, his world, his dead friend.
One moment stopped me cold, and it isn’t in the action. Paris Jackson plays Darla, Unique’s girlfriend. She’s white; he isn’t; the film knows this matters without making a speech about it. At some point she tells him to let her know when he gets home safe. Six words. The most ordinary thing in the world. Except in Karensville, with Unique, in this film, it isn’t ordinary at all. It’s a whole history in a sentence, and for about thirty seconds, One Spoon of Chocolate is exactly the film it kept almost being.
Tarantino is an executive producer. The film wears that influence visibly, maybe too visibly. But what separates Diggs from his EP is that Diggs doesn’t aestheticize this suffering from a comfortable distance. He lingers on bruised faces because he’s bearing witness, not framing a shot. That distinction matters. It matters more than the film’s considerable structural problems.
The last line tells you Diggs knows there’s a bigger, darker, more complete version of this story living somewhere in him. I believe him. I want to see it.
One Spoon of Chocolate
Rated R For strong racial violence, language including slurs, and disturbing content
Violence & intensity: Strong: A young Black man is beaten, abducted, murdered, and his organs harvested in the film’s opening sequence. Racially motivated beatings with baseball bats occur throughout. The film’s revenge climax involves sustained hand-to-hand violence. The film deliberately lingers on bruised and bloodied faces as an act of witness, this is intentional and thematically central, but it is not easy viewing. Based in part on real events.
Language: Strong — racial slurs: Heavy use of racial slurs by white supremacist characters — pervasive and deliberate as part of the film’s portrayal of systemic racism. Strong profanity throughout. The language is confrontational by design, not incidental. Parents should be prepared for this being a significant element of the viewing experience.
Sexual content / nudity: Mild: A romantic relationship between the lead character and his girlfriend is depicted but not graphically. No explicit sexual content or nudity reported. The interracial relationship carries social and thematic weight in the context of the film’s setting.
Drugs, alcohol & smoking: Mild–Moderate Social drinking and likely smoking in keeping with the film’s neo-blaxploitation aesthetic and setting. No depiction of drug use as a plot element.
Substance use is incidental rather than central.
Themes & context: Heavy — adult themes Systemic racism, racially motivated murder, organ harvesting, white supremacy, and vigilante justice are the film’s central subjects. Based partly on real events experienced by the director and people he knows. The film is a deliberate act of witness and anger — not exploitation for shock value, but not softened either. Recommended for mature audiences prepared for difficult subject matter presented with serious intent.
Age recommendation: 17 and older: Racial violence, pervasive slurs, and disturbing content make this unsuitable for younger audiences. Not appropriate for family viewing.
