The Illadelph

Mark Webber turns his experiences as a homeless kid in Kensington into his first movie.

by Molly Eichel

ILL VIBE: A scene from Explicit Ills, including director Mark Webber's mother, Cheri Honkala (left), Paul Dano and Rosario Dawson.

It could have been almost any city. Poverty, the central theme of Mark Webber's writing and directing debut, Explicit Ills, exists everywhere. But for Webber, it had to be the city where he grew up, where he experienced poverty firsthand.

"In the writing process, Philadelphia was just as much a character as any of the actors in the film," Webber says.

Explicit Ills is an ensemble film, following four stories centering around the have-nots in Philadelphia. A mother (Rosario Dawson) can't afford her son's asthma medication; a couple (Naomie Harris and Tariq Trotter) try to scrape up the cash to open up a health food store; a boy (Martin Cepeda) learns to capture the heart of the girl on his block; and two drug-fueled hipsters (Frankie Shaw and Lou Taylor Pucci) carry on a love affair that is simultaneously saving and dooming them.

Threads of Webber's life run through those of the film's protagonists. Webber and his mother lived on the Kensington streets when he was 11. He enrolled in Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) but was kicked out sophomore year — although he's OK with the school listing him as an alum. From there, Webber worked his way up through the indie film hierarchy, eventually leading the cast of Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State and playing Bill Murray's maybe-son in Broken Flowers, directed by Explicit Ills executive producer Jim Jarmusch.

Radicalism is in Webber's genes. His mother, Cheri Honkala, is a homeless rights activist and her influence is all over the film. "If people come away from my film and they are like, 'Whoa, Mark Webber is a leftist,' ... I'm like, cool, that was my intention," he says.

It would have been easy for Webber to portray Philadelphia as a hellhole for the impoverished. But he doesn't. Instead, he imbues the city, even in its lowest depths, with rich colors, showing it in art-house long shots, compliments of Patrice Lucien Cochet, who won a Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival for his work on the film.

Some critics have derided that choice. One review calls Explicit Ills "The Wire without any of the grit." But Webber says his intention was to show his own experience. "I hate films where they show a bad part of town where there are four dudes standing around an oil can wearing tattered clothes," says Webber. "That's not real."

Reality is important to Webber. When Demetri (Cepeda) dons a pair of fake glasses and sweater vest and douses himself with cologne to impress a girl, that's all Webber — down to the green bottle of Polo.

But just as using the city to illustrate his experiences was necessary to the formation of the film, so was using actual Philadelphians. Among those making cameos are Honkala, two.one.five magazine founder Tayyib Smith and even a group of hungry Philadelphians. Trotter, best known as Black Thought from the Roots, takes a lead role as Kaleef, the man with health food entrepreneurial aspirations.

Webber wrote the part specifically for Trotter. When they met around 1999, Webber told Trotter he was going to direct a film one day and asked him if he would be in it. "I was like, 'Sure kid.' He kept in contact with my manager. We would put him on the guest list at Roots shows and he would always update me on the status of his project," Trotter says, commuting back home from the Roots' current day job as house band on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. "I hadn't heard from him in a while and I finally got a phone call. I was kind of floored about how sincere he was and a man of his word he was. So I read it. And it was dope."

Trotter was especially impressed by the risks Webber took by telling a politically charged story. "There are so many stories within the city that have never been told," says Trotter. "He was able to weave together a whole storyline about four or five different relationships that was a perfect way to showcase that section of the city."

But that's Webber just writing what he knows. "What really makes me happy at the end of the day is doing a service to other people. The more I worry about myself, the more I just worry about myself," says Webber. "And that's no fun."

(molly.eichel@citypaper.net)

Read Sam Adams' review of Explicit Ills.