This 21-year-old writer, director, actor, and more plays the quietest part in his Indie Episodic pilot, “It’s Not About Jimmy Keene.” Ivan (Jaffe) is the brother caught in between two warring sisters, a dying father, and a mom who’s trying to keep the peace. In the middle of it all is the eponymous Jimmy Keene, a black teenager shot by the police which has caused the family to fall into bitter, self-inflicted diatribes. Jada (Gabrielle Maiden) is the younger sister filled with anger; she wants to protest, march, and focus on the racial separation in America. But Aliza (Okwui Okpokwasili), the wealthy older sister, thinks these issues go beyond race, into “resource allocation and geography”; she insists anyone would slit anyone’s throat if they came between each other’s needs. Ivan is trying to sort both positions, as well as his feelings of general loss to the dissolving family around him.

I previously wrote about the second Indie Episodic program at this year's Sundance Film Festival, a group that included Abby McEnany and Tim Mason's sad-yet-hopeful-yet-funny Work in Progressand Caleb Jaffe's preternaturally mature It's Not About Jimmy Keene. Both projects arrive with such a clear, fully developed sense of their characters and their worlds that a network or streaming service could acquire them either confident of ongoing series elements, in the case of Work in Progress, or confident with the limitless upside of the assembled talent, in the case of Jaffe and his Jimmy Keene cast.

We'll see if any of these Indie Episodic shorts can find wider-reaching homes. I would be fine seeing more of any of them, but I'm not going to campaign for any of them over Work in Progressand It's Not About Jimmy Keene.

A mixed-race family is the focal point of the pilot for 21-year-old director, Caleb Jaffe’s, episodic series, “It’s Not About Jimmy Keene,” which premieres at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival January 29, 2019.

The death of a young black man—shot three times in the back—by members of the Tulsa Police Department, serves as the dramatic underpinning for the family’s fraught interactions inside their aging home in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles.

As their ailing white father looks on in baffled dismay, and their powerful black psychiatrist mother calls on them to be calm, three siblings engage in a pitched war of socio-political ideas. It’s a battle similar to the one roiling America in the age of President Trump and Black Lives Matter.

Jaffe scored a fantastic cast, including Roger Guenveur Smith, who has starred in a number of Sundance hits including, “Birth of a Nation, “Dope,” and “Bitch,”; as well as Gabrielle Maiden (“I Love Dick,” “Stranger Things,” “SMILF”); and performance artist, choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Okwui Okpokwasili.

Born of Jaffe’s own tumultuous experience with a racially charged incident in college, “It’s Not About Jimmy Keene,” seeks to uncover uncomfortable truths about the nature of individuality within the context of family and race.