Three years is enough time for a comeback… right? (Take note, Ezra Miller.) On Thursday, BET+ announced that it had picked up B-Boy Blues, an LGBTQ film directed and written by Jussie Smollett. It’s his first project since being found guilty of making false reports of a hate crime.
The film is an adaptation of a James Earl Hardy novel of the same name and stars folks such as Timothy Richardson, Brandee Evans, Heater B, Marquise Vilson, and Jabari Reed. Mona Scott-Young is set to be a producer on the film.
“Through our content slate, we are intentional about representing the fullness of the Black experience, including that of the LGBTQ+ community,” said BET+ executive vice president Devin Griffin in a statement. “‘B-Boy Blues’ is an artful, heart-rending film about the complexity of love – something we all can relate to.”
The movie is set to be a “clash of class and culture” that follows a Brooklyn journalist and a bike messenger who fall in love. That’s cute.
Let’s run it back to the beginning. Smollett’s bizarre saga started more than three years ago, when he first told police that two men disguised in balaclava-style masks hung a noose around his neck and yelled racist and homophobic slurs at him during an assault on a snowy street outside his Chicago apartment. In the weeks following his report, Smollett himself became a suspect in the incident, with authorities accusing him of staging the attack with help from Nigeria-born brothers Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo.
The brothers testified at trial that Smollett paid them to stage the attack. Smollett maintained his innocence through defiant testimony, but a jury convicted him on five of six counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report. He was later sentenced to five months in prison, 30 months probation and had to pay a $25,00 fine and $120,000 restitution to the city. He was released from prison after just one week in March 2022.