Exhibiting Forgiveness is an emotionally sophisticated flick about why learning to accept others’ flaws is essential, even with the pain it carries. Forgiveness follows the turbulent relationships of a dysfunctional family. Tarrell (André Holland), a Black painter revered for his breathtakingly colorful portraits pulled from childhood memories, uses art to extract beauty from his past traumas—and help him cope with their symptoms, such as sometimes violent panic attacks. Living with his singer wife Aisha (Andra Day) and son Jermaine, his career is growing steadily. One day, during a trip back to his hometown to move his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) closer to his family, he gets a surprise visit: La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), Tarrell’s formerly drug-addicted and abusive-turned-deadbeat father. After decades of crack addiction and a recent rib-breaking incident when defending a store clerk in a convenience store robbery, La’Ron cleans up his act through God and becomes desperate to repair destroyed familial relationships. With Joyce begging her son to give La’Ron another chance, Tarrell must navigate his mother’s wishes, a searing past, a “formerly” abusive dad, a new family, and his career—forcing him to move past canvas to face his problems.

Forgiveness is a near awe-inspiring mix of beautifully captured realism, raw emotion, and densely imperfect characters. Director-writer and painter Titus Kaphar entraps viewers with a family much like any other, only the central character uses paint to heal. Through the inclusion of Kaphar’s handmade paintings such as the sharply tragic portrait of a bearded La’Ron in Smoldering Embers and his knack for dense trauma grounding, Forgiveness maintains the difficult balance between vulnerable conflict and touchiness that usually leaves films feeling overly sentimental or cheesy.

Through heart-striking performances all around—Holland gives Tarrell a sturdiness despite his injuries, Ellis-Taylor fills Joyce with battle hardened tenacity in her motherly role, and Jelks studiously demonstrates how easy it is to hide away despite the people you hurt—Kaphar delves into familial trauma’s depths to demonstrate how people deal with it differently, whether their strategies stem from dysfunction or not. For example, forgiveness’s primary motive for Tarrell’s parents is God. Despite shown flashbacks of La’Ron abusing both Tarrell and Joyce over the years, “the Bible says if you can’t forgive you won’t be forgiven.” Joyce repeats this notion to Tarrell, attempting to steer him towards mending things with La’Ron. Tarrell refuses; he asks “why did you leave me with him?” and denies God’s hand in the mix. When going to his wife, though she agrees with his Godless sentiment, insists upon the same idea: “if you don’t deal with it here it’ll follow us home.” Whether or not God exists, these ties complicate his life; holes in the wall and a terrified child would be the least of his worries if nothing is faced.

While the answers aren’t clear, Tarrell begins understanding through conversations with his father and a rethinking of his memories as detailed in his work. In one of Forgiveness’s most combative moments, Tarrell interrogates La’Ron about why/when he started crack, which blows up into a larger conversation about flaws and parenting. After discussing how La’Ron’s father would point a gun at him and his family, teaching them nothing but how to work hard, he describes his father as a good but “very complicated man.” Tarrell freaks, tells La’Ron his father was a bad man, La’Ron throws a mug, the two argue about how La’Ron’s “the same as I remember. You say you’ve changed, but all I remember is this,” and the pair gives up on mending yet again.

Tarrell then paints a new picture of his injured teenage self mowing a lawn taken from a memory of his father working him ragged even after stomping a nail through his foot. While anger arises, Tarrell mostly reflects—he tries to understand that this is all his father knew. He begins seeing the past through a lens of patterns, connecting how La’Ron behaves to how he described his father as behaving to how he, Tarrell, behaves towards his own son: “Sometimes I think of what you’d say when Jermaine’s upset, and I hate it.” People are pattern-seeking creatures. We find them in work, people, hobbies, and experiences without realizing. Thus we also evolve as results of those patterns; we learn how to exist and interact with the world through parents/guardians, and once out of youth old habits die hard, even if we don’t like them. To move forward, sometimes patterns need to shatter—something Tarrell painfully breaks himself.

Thus, Tarrell learns that he owes his father nothing. He doesn’t have to repair their relations or take La’Ron for an everyday figure in his life. But to move on, he has to let go, and forgiveness is the only way forward: “You took the past, you can keep it…. Life didn’t give you many choices, I get that…. But the future is mine,” he says to La’Ron as he pleads one final time for things to change. While Forgiveness can very occasionally drag, and some opening scenes and characters feel unnaturally abandoned, a solid blend between the canvas, imagery, and character work makes this a fantastic affair of love-hate relationships, and why we should all be more understanding.

Opens Friday, 10/18 @ AMC Boston Common & AMC South Bay