Winning an Oscar isn’t only a boon for a director going forward. Just as fresh interest and scrutiny will accompany the filmmaker’s future works, so too will his archive prompt a re-evaluation. This month, Criterion, striking while the iron is hot, released not just the definitive home-video edition of Sean Baker’s 2025 Oscar mega-winner Anora ($27.99 Blu-ray, $20.99 DVD), but the Blu-ray debut of Baker’s third feature, 2008’s Prince of Broadway ($27.99), previously available only as a pricey and long out-of-print DVD.
Those approaching Prince of Broadway seeking the seeds of the director’s signature style and themes won’t have to dig into the weeds to notice them. As he says in a new introduction for this Blu-ray, he believes that Prince of Broadway, not his more widely seen and praised Tangerine (2015), should be considered his breakout picture. Indeed, Baker seems to have emerged fully formed on this micro-budget outing of less than $50,000, shooting with a skeleton crew on the streets of New York City and capturing everything his devotees have come to admire about his work: his inquisitiveness in capturing marginalized and diverse subcultures outside of his own life experience; his hurtling, verité-style camerawork that erases distinctions between fiction and documentary; and his humanistic approach to the gig economy, in which his characters live one day at a time, surviving on the hustle.
Such is the reality, unglamorous but seemingly fulfilling, for Lucky (Prince Adu), an undocumented West African immigrant hawking counterfeit apparel in the wholesale district of a pre-gentrified Broadway. Baker opens the film on a close-up of Lucky’s chattering mouth, his chief asset. The man can talk a game as he seduces passersby with a barrage of brand names, all of them available at a deep discount if they simply follow him into the back room, speakeasy-style, of his Armenian friend and shopkeeper Levon’s (Karren Karagulian) discreet storefront. Provided both men avoid the occasional run-in with law enforcement, it’s a life that, if not charmed, can at least sustain their one-bedroom apartments.
Lucky’s life is thrown into tumult by what we quickly recognize as the film’s inciting incident. Linda (Kat Sanchez), an old girlfriend, appears at his apartment with unexpected baggage: an 18-month-old child she claims is his, and that she insists he raise for the next two weeks. Lucky, who knows not a whit of fatherhood, suddenly has an anchor around his business and his relationship with his current girlfriend Karina (Keyali Mayaga), both of which begin to go south. And yet even as Lucky describes his new charge as a “thing,” a “monster” and a “devil in my life” whose paternity is unproven, he adapts. He buys a stroller and a pop-up crib, learns to change a diaper, and can’t help but forge a bond with his annoying responsibility.
If any of this plot description sounds sentimental on paper, Baker’s raw script, co-written by Darren Dean, and his equally gritty direction dispel such notions. One can imagine a similar plot to a glossy Hollywood movie with, say, Will Smith, as the hustler reformed into a respectable life by the unwanted gift, each granular transformation accompanied by a soundtrack of swelling strings. By contrast, Prince of Broadway is street cinema through and through, as Baker’s camera jabs, shakes and observes an eternally pulsating environment. There’s no room for a musical score given all of the f***s flying from characters’ mouths; sometimes it’s the only word you hear amid Baker’s cacophonous city symphony.
Yet there’s plenty of humor in Prince of Broadway, mirroring the tenuous balance of tragicomedy that has come to define his filmography. This includes Lucky insisting to potential customers that 10% of their purchase will go toward “charity for kids in China,” and the film’s best visual gag: the moment Lucky leaves the baby behind in a momentary bout of frustration, and the server at a soul-food restaurant leaves the 1-year-old with the check.
At the core of Prince of Broadway’s success is Baker’s capacious heart. Heroes and villains are scarcely identifiable in his tapestry of troubled souls, as he offers us a peak into Linda’s motivations for casting off her child in what becomes more than a two-week vacation. Raised by a single mother, she, too, comes from a hardscrabble life, and she earns our empathy. So does Levon’s girlfriend Nadia (Victoria Tate), a U.S. citizen half his age, who was pressured into marrying him so he could obtain a green card three years ago, and now wants out of the arrangement.
As is often the case with Baker’s M.O., his cast is populated almost entirely by nonprofessional or first-time actors in art-mirroring-life scenarios. Baker and his small crew discovered Lucky by trawling the wholesale district for some six months until finally meeting Prince Adu, a scrappy reseller whose personality and charisma helped shape the movie that was then only percolating in Baker’s head.
Criterion’s supplements-loaded package includes two audio commentaries, documentary featurettes about the movie dating from 2011 and 2024, and a brand-new introduction from Baker, which covers much of the material from the extended featurettes in a compact form. The distributor’s trademark attention to detail extends to the design of the disc itself, which is manufactured to resemble a bootleg BD-R with “Prince of Broadway” scrawled in black marker.
Contrary to the many knock-offs that appear in its story, however, this multifaceted paean to immigration, commerce and paternity is very much the real deal.