Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (June 2, 2025)
Despite a career that began in the 1960s – and that introduced him to 1970s youths as “Easy Reader” on The Electric Company - Morgan Freeman didn’t take off as a “name” film actor until his Oscar-nominated turn in 1987’s Street Smart. 1989 offered the culmination of Freeman’s newfound fame.
Freeman worked in three prominent projects across 1989, with his Oscar-nominated performance in Best Picture victor Driving Miss Daisy as his peak. Freeman also played a significant supporting role in the Civil War tale Glory.
Though nominated as Best Actor for Daisy, Freeman shared the lead with Jessica Tandy. Freeman’s third 1989 flick delivered the only one of three in which he played the undisputed main character, as Lean On Me places him at the top of the story’s heap.
Once a model facility, Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey degenerates into a drug and violence infested building in which the students barely learn. Former Eastside teacher Joe Clark (Freeman) returns as its principal.
Clark brings with him a non-nonsense approach that rubs many the wrong way. As Clark rules Eastside with an iron fist, we see how his techniques impact students and staff.
Movies about “inspirational educators” go back at least as far as 1939’s Goodbye Mr. Chips and probably earlier. The late 1980s offered a minor wave of these flicks, as in addition to Lean, we found 1988’s Stand and Deliver and 1989’s Dead Poet’s Society.
Of this trio, Stand and Lean offer the most obvious connections. Both deal with low-achieving inner city schools in the 1980s.
The biggest difference relates to the nature of their protagonists. While Stand’s Jaime Escalante pushes his students to surpass expectations and excel at an extremely high level, Lean’s Joe Clark just bullies everyone in hopes that Eastside’s kids can make the most basic of basic scores.
Which they didn’t actually do in real life, as state test results barely budged during Clark’s tenure. Don’t expect that fact to emerge in Lean, though, as it offers a pretty fictionalized version of Clark’s life and career.
Amazingly, this Blu-ray’s case refers to Lean as a true story – and it does so twice! Not “based on a true story” or “inspired by a true story”.
No – the text goes whole hog to imply Lean will present the truth and nothing but the truth. Which it then utterly fails to achieve.
I’ve worked in education for more than 30 years and disagree with much of what Clark did – or at least Movie Clark, as I don’t know how much Real Clark matches his cinematic version. But I’ve spent enough time with principals who bully staff and kids ala Movie Clark to know that it doesn’t become a practical method over the long haul.
I can see Clark’s appeal in the 1980s, though. As the US re-embraced conservatism, simplistic “no nonsense” approaches to social problems became popular.
After all, this was the era in which Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” plan intended to solve drug addiction. An aggressive and loud man who stalks the halls of his high school with a baseball bat and shouts down anyone who disagrees with him completely fit into the 1980s paradigm of “solutions”.
Expelling the lowest achieving kids boosts your scores and attendance rates. But how does it help vulnerable students when they get thrown to the wolves?
Anyway, I don’t want to make this whole review my editorial about what I do/don’t think works in the educational system. Instead, I should look at Lean as a film.
Even if I ignore the rampant factual liberties, Lean sputters because it seems like such a simplistic approach to its subject matter. Maybe a movie about a Black principal who largely works with minority kids shouldn’t have come from a white director and a white screenwriter.
Would Black or Latino filmmakers have brought out more nuance to the tale? Probably, as Lean feels too much like the view of the “inner city” from people with no real comprehension of that domain.
Director John G. Avildsen enjoyed success with 1976’s Rocky and 1984’s Karate Kid. Both offered rousing “underdog” stories.
Avildsen did fine with both of those, but he attempts the same vibe to Lean and it doesn’t work. This tale needs a more nuanced approach than the one-dimensional take we find.
Instead, we get Clark as the hero who battles the system. Oh, Lean occasionally depicts the blowback he encounters, but the story tends to paint his detractors as “villains” with their own agendas.
My biggest issue is that Clark never seems to respect anyone else – not the students, not the teachers, not the parents. He just rampages through the film with his own ideas and little willingness to change.
Freeman does fine as the lead, though the script doesn’t give him a lot of room to maneuver. Basically Clark starts as a tyrant and ends there, as despite some attempts to soften him along the way, the view of the principal as intolerant dictator sticks.
All of this leaves us with a one-sided drama that seeks easy answers to tough questions. Dated and melodramatic, the movie sputters.
