Liberty Heights is a hard-sell nostalgia flick where period is established by a string of shiny vintage cars (no beaters in Baltimore?) and well-chosen R&B and doo-wop songs, memories are made, Important Lessons are learned, and predictable voice-over homilies sum things up for viewers who may have cat-napped ("Life is made of a few big moments and a lot of little ones"). This end-of-an-era essay seeks to do for race what Diner did for sexual politics — document a cultural moment when the rules of engagement were being discarded. Liberty Heights may, in the end, be more progressive than Diner, which ultimately sided with boys-only camaraderie despite so expertly exposing the arrested development at the heart of its characters' late-night bull sessions. But Levinson's latest mid-century memory piece can't match the personality and good humor of his first.

A coming-of-age story about two teenage brothers in predominantly Jewish northwest Baltimore, Liberty Heights is set in 1954, one of the most iconic years in American history. It was the year that the Brown vs. Board of Education decision dictated from on high a radical cultural shift, while emerging musical miscegenation was making it a reality from the bottom up. Liberty Heights is about a moment when kids from different ethnic and social classes—blacks, Jews, and WASPs—began to interact on more equal terms. But this story is old hat by now, and Liberty Heights doesn't add anything new to the genre.