Stunning Photos of The Obamas’ Love That Will Melt Your Heart

The film chronicles the first date between Obama and Michelle Robinson (a wonderful Tika Sumpter). It turns out he has a full day planned: a visit to an art gallery, a picnic lunch, the community meeting (where he is the featured speaker) and a screening of Spike Lee’s newly released “Do the Right Thing”. “Give her some slack”, Sumpter expressed. First time writer/director Richard Tanne has made a decision to buck that trend in perhaps the most audacious way possible: By detailing the first date between President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.

The actor radiates an easygoing charm and flashes a dazzling smile.

Tanne recalls seeing accounts of Michelle and Barack’s first date during the 2008 presidential campaign.

I think you can see it in this film from the beginning, when the Janet [Jackson] song, [“Miss You Much,”] comes in at the very beginning of the film.

There are so many variables that go into determining whether or not something is a “good” date that it’s impossible to control. I suppose [with] my wife.

“I just hoped she would say yes”, he said. Well, it’s not technically a date at first since 25-year-old Michelle refuses to call it that, but the future president tries his hardest to win her over after picking her up in a vehicle with part of the floor missing. The worst one, hmm. I think it’s a love story. As the credits rolled, I heard one of the most moving pieces of music I’ve ever heard in my life.

Obviously, sometimes I say some things that people don’t like. I wasn’t rude. But I was dumb.

How do you embody one of the most famous women in the world when you’ve never even met them? I suppose if I was the actual president that would be way harder. He doesn’t really change at all, but for Michelle, it’s a defining day, and it’s her perspective that informs the film. There were so many words and emotions to figure out.

The young man shows up late to pick up the young lady which is something he will do frequently in the future. “You can be a feminist and shave your underarms and be pretty while having thoughts”. I removed some layers from that, so it wasn’t a direct impersonation.

Why do you think music is so integral to storytelling? .

The motivation was he was really enamored and smitten with this woman. I mean, he did, by the end. He learns that she likes chocolate ice cream; she learns that he lost his taste for ice cream after working at Baskin Robbins. That was why he was interested in her.

What really makes the film, though, is the performances of Sumpter and Sawyers.

When blood is finally shed (and other bodily fluids-don’t get us started), the result is magisterial brutality on a level with Sam Peckinpah. Maybe that’s why I was cast? What holds us to our seats is wondering how it will happen. But even though the audience knows how this story ends up, the film does little to shed light on how it truthfully started. I didn’t know her reactions [to what I’m saying] so I could smile back or look away as the scene unfolded. Instead, there is a feeling that these two are learning how to speak around each other for the first time. What can you say about the cultural images and stereotypes that Barack had versus the ones you grew up with? If you make them too stately it can seem like a school play. They would usher in a new wave of progress. But leave the oddity of Southside With You’s existence aside, and the film is still compelling for the way it celebrates a powerful partnership by unraveling its earliest moments. It’s part of our thread of the past and hopefully it unravels in the future and is no longer a thread. They put in the work and they put in the preparation.

They bettered themselves and their community and, in a wider sense, America. There’s the burgeoning onscreen romance between Barack and Michelle, but then there’s the love story that the movie’s existence both implies and tries to feed – the romance between Obama and the American public. I became a father at 26, and I still mess up some things. We all mess up. “And to me it’s also about a woman who doesn’t want to be overshadowed by this hotshot guy coming in from Harvard”. We’re all flawed and fractured.