Yeun is particularly thoughtful about this stuff, which has made him something of an ideal ombudsman on the issues of parity and representation, which crop up in sometimes strange ways. Of course, in a place as white and retrograde as Hollywood, changing the notions of who gets let in and who gets taken seriously doesn't happen easily.

Boots Riley told me that in casting Yeun for the role of Squeeze in Sorry to Bother You, he needed someone вЂњhandsome enough that you thought that Tessa Thompson was going to want to go after him.вЂќ That he happens to be extremely good-looking doesn't hurt, either. Maybe not surprisingly, the role has ushered him toward a new, rarefied space: a leading man who, through some alchemy of determination, curiosity, charisma, and luck, is expanding in the American imagination the possibilities for Asian American actors and the stories they can tell onscreen. And no one fucks up more than Jacob, whose existential turmoil gives Yeun the fodder to deliver his most multilayered performance yet. Race is an ambient specter, but it doesn't cast a shadow over the characters or predetermine what they do they're allowed to just be who they are, fuckups and all. Unlike other immigrant narratives, it centers the Koreanness of the Yi family while presenting their new white neighbors as an at-times annoying but ultimately benign Other, like the Yis had crash-landed among the Jar Jar Binkses. At its heart, Minari is an optimistic film about family and the different frequencies that love can manifest. Set in a sun-dappled version of the '80s, the film features Yeun as Jacob Yi, an obstinate Korean father who uproots his wife and two young children from California to start a farm in rural Arkansas, which might as well be an alien exoplanet thousands of parsecs away. That gaze is encoded into us, and the last boss is yourself.вЂќ But we forget that we are also that gaze. вЂњWe profess that we're caught in the white American gaze, and that's true.

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