This old-style life-lesson drama is clearly a labor of love: La Mission was written and directed by Peter Bratt; stars his brother, Law & Orderalum Benjamin Bratt (who also produced); and is set in San Francisco's Mission barrio, where the Bratts grew up. The warmth comes through, even if the storytelling is simplistic and clichéd. Bratt plays a tough, widowed, recovering-alcoholic father and man-about-the- neighborhood who has serious trouble accepting that his teenage son (Jeremy Ray Valdez) is gay. As a strong, independent black woman renting an apartment in the building, Erika Alexander provides additional feminist lessons in consciousness raising.
