When Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, it felt like the announcement of a powerful artistic voice with a long career ahead of her. The film won the festival’s Special Jury Prize, Harris became the first Black woman to sell a theatrical feature to a major distributor (Miramax), and its wide release in 200 American theaters brought critical and box office success. It eventually secured distribution in 20 countries.1 Harris, who left the advertising industry in the 1980s, had traveled a long road to break into the industry. She wrote Just Another Girl in between phone calls at temp jobs and had to raise its miniscule budget (around $130,000) door to door during production.2 Yet on paper, her explosive success with Just Another Girl seemed a guarantor that she was in the industry to stay.
It was not to be. Harris has been unable to finance a second feature film for 30 years, a reflection of the roadblocks facing many promising Black female filmmakers. Her debut, a film that balances its lived-in specificity with a sharp political edge, carries a tragic undercurrent of “what could have been.” Despite Harris’s sacrifices, we have yet to see another of her feature-length visions on the big screen.
But knowing about the obstacles in the film’s way also makes the final result feel all the more miraculous. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., despite being so specifically seeped in the early 90s Black experience, is just as bracing now as it was upon release. Part of that comes from the film feeling more authentic, more “real,” than most Hollywood-distributed cinema before or since. It centers on Chantel, a bossy Brooklyn teenager played by first-time actor Ariyan A. Johnson, as she navigates her world with a magnetic, acerbic confidence that just barely hides her wide-eyed innocence. It is a world marked by poverty, violence, and institutional prejudice, but also buzzy, loving camaraderie. And Harris imbues all of it with a prophetic sense of contemporary relevance; Chantel was, and is, just another girl going through the foibles of teenage-hood.
The opening scene follows full-time student Chantel on her commute to her part-time job at Zabar’s (one of New York’s most famous neighborhood food stores), and Harris captures it all in a montage of everyday life. Kids jump rope, cars honk and screech, graffiti blankets the subway station walls with color, and a hip-hop soundtrack gives rhythm to it all as the camera whips and pans. If Chantel’s life has rough-looking edges, Harris gives our introduction to them a live-wire current. It helps that the dialogue is frequently hilarious. Chantel has frank but completely uneducated arguments about sex and HIV with her friends Natete (Ebony Jerido) and Paula (Chequita Jackson) and it’s hard not to chuckle while you wince. These are teenagers who are left woefully uninformed by their teachers, parents, and the media, and they’re making the best of it. What else can they do?
One of Harris’s ingenious moves is to have Chantel repeatedly address us through the camera. Her monologues, frequently about her dreams and the frustrating barriers in the way, carry the weight of lived experience. She is far from a saint, but no teenager is, and Harris helps us take her side. Chantel is brusk with the entitled, upper-class white customers who take her service for granted and ribs her on-off boyfriend Gerard (Jerard Washington) for laughs. She has a sharp intelligence that won’t let her suffer fools. “I’ve got it all planned out,” she tells us as she hides in her room from her loudly arguing parents. “That’s not gonna be me. After graduation, I’m going straight to college, then med school.” Chantel’s in a rush, but she’s also in a rebellious push for freedom. This leads her to a relationship with a suave young man named Tyrone (Kevin Thigpen) -- and then a sudden, unwanted pregnancy. Chantel must decide whether to have an abortion, and from there the film finds its central dramatic tension.
Throughout, there are moments when Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'s underlying concern, the politics of existence for Black women, comes to the fore. It begins interpersonally, in those unguided conversations about sex, but extends to all walks of life. In one sequence Chantel challenges her white history teacher to at least address the issues that plague her community. “African-American males die every day from drugs, violence, and AIDS,” she points out. “African-American babies die twice as much as white babies. Right here in this country.” The teacher bristles at the notion that any of it belongs in the room. “This is a history class,” he says. “We’re not dealing with contemporary issues.” Of course, studying history is an exercise in finding lessons for right now, but he’s ignorant of the irony. Unable to let it go, Chantel gets sent to her principal, who tells her to cut the curse words and “be a lady” lest she be unready for the “real world.” Resources outside of school aren’t much help, even when they try to be. A sympathetic clinic counselor would be a lifeline, but she is legally barred from even discussing abortion. Even Chantel’s sweet moments with Tyrone, whose parents hold steady, high-paying jobs, are marked by separations of class. At every turn, her inner life is filtered through a system exerting power and control.
In part, Harris’s film is a tragedy about a young Black woman who, by virtue of those three identifiers, is forced to live out the expectations of her symbolic role in society. There is a contrast between the Chantel we come to know – whip-smart, uncompromising, clear-headed, ambitious – and the abstraction that others expect her to fulfill. Black women’s coming-of-age is a story too often simplified, unconsidered, or outright silenced, and Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. is honest about the difficulties in rectifying that. But the film’s ending, which mustn’t be spoiled, gives Chantel a hopeful, if compromised, path forward. Though the film initially cultivated a reputation as a “warning” film about the dangers of teenage promiscuity, time has allowed for much richer readings. Harris has not given us a PSA, but a complex and specific portrait of Black life that avoids the outright gloom of too many others. Her protagonist begins and ends the film as aspiring and assured as ever, even when her life’s frame of reference has fundamentally shifted.
It is telling that Harris ends the film with a title card that reads “A Film That Hollywood Dared Not Do.” With hindsight it feels like a premonition: the industry remains largely inhospitable to movies about the Black experience. Even when films like this one break through, they are often undermined by stereotypes unless led by an uncompromising filmmaker; Harris had to hold firm against financiers who wanted Tyrone to be a drug dealer. But the three decades afterward have given us glimpses of what might have been had Harris been given another shot. Despite her creative silencing, her film’s influence is deep and long-reaching. You can see it everywhere in contemporary cinema; independent films such as Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011) and more mainstream fare such as The Hate U Give (2018) all exist because of Just Another Girl. And Harris herself, now a teacher at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, is hard at work on The I.R.T. Diaries, a documentary about the making of her first film, and has also completed a screenplay for a sequel.
“All I can say,” she told Filmmaker Magazine last year, “is that this film really should get made.”3 We should all be so lucky.
1. FF Presents: JUST ANOTHER GIRL ON THE I.R.T. - Leslie Harris, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnYRx4ZprNg.
2. Leslie Harris. Charlie Rose. Accessed March 15, 2023. https://charlierose.com/videos/25355.
3. Keogan, Natalia. “‘Have I Mentioned I’m Working on a Sequel?’ Leslie Harris on Her Groundbreaking 1993 Film <em>Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.</Em> | Filmmaker Magazine.” Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a Focus on Independent Film, Offering Articles, Links, and Resources. (blog), May 27, 2022. https://filmmakermagazine.com/114800-interview-2022-leslie-harris-just-another-girl-on-the-i-r-t/