Filmmaker Josalynn Smith’s debut feature, Ride or Die, kicks off Cinema St. Louis’ 25 th annual Filmmakers Showcase on Friday evening. Produced by Jamie Foxx’s company Foxxhole, Ride or Die premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. Smith grew up in St. Louis and graduated from Columbia University’s Film MFA program and has been based in Los Angeles since 2021.
Ride or Die is, on the surface, a familiar piece of filmic iconography: two young lovers headed west on a journey through the pastoral vastness of America. But there’s plenty of blood, sex, and subtlety to be navigated by repressed Black filmmaker Paula and her DGAF white high school crush Sloane after the women reunite and hit the road.
“What happens when you put Black people or queer people in this vast landscape that’s supposed to represent such freedom and such release?” says Smith. “There’s a tension when that’s not quite the case.”
Paula, who has ambitions of moviemaking greatness, is on her way out of St. Louis when she comes across her sexy former classmate Sloane working at a thrift store. With nothing to lose and scores to settle, Sloane attaches herself to the smitten Paula’s trip to the promised land of Los Angeles.
From the jump, the chemistry is electric but the obstacles are relentless, from a blown tire to a menacing methed-out Juggalo. While both women are in serious peril, the rural expanse of Missourah holds threats for a Black woman that a white one either doesn’t perceive or floats through.
Sloane appears not to see a lynched effigy in a tree, a signal Paula immediately clocks. A racist proprietor refuses Paula a room at an obviously mostly empty motel and then Sloane, through the magic of white tears, secures the room—but does Paula really want to sleep in a place like that? Did Sloane stop to ask herself the question?
“It’s obvious that Sloane’s actions are putting Paula in danger, but you know that Sloane is a person who is trying to come to terms with a lot of trauma,” says Smith. “There’s a sense that we’re all in this together, but then sometimes white partners can be so oblivious to things,” they say. “With Ride or Die I was always trying to touch upon the
question of, with a relationship that’s really messy, whose pain matters more?”
The film never lets up its bow-tight tension, which makes for an exhilarating ride. Every turn presents Paula with an option to return to the stifling, imperfect embrace of St. Louis, and at every turn she deepens the danger.
But she really has no other choice.
“Sloane sees Paula in the way that Paula wants to be seen, and Paula sees Sloane in the way that she wants to be seen, and still puts her on that high school pedestal, and wants her to be her movie star,” says Smith, politely exasperated with me for asking why the seemingly levelheaded Paula keeps making these insane choices. “It’s a very like 22-year-old thing to do.”
The road trip genre is a favorite of Smith’s, they say.
“I’m deeply in love with the aesthetics of Americana,” says Smith. “It’s baked into the American psyche—the freedom and the conquest and the manifest destiny of going out West. I wanted to tap into that iconography.”
The movie’s look, feel, and cadence reflect Smith’s love of the genre.
“This is like a psychic twin to The Living End,” Gregg Araki’s 1992 crime-filled road trip romance flick featuring two HIV positive gay men, Smith says. “It harkens back to that like 90s queercore aspect that has a DIY feel as well to it.”
It also echoes 1996’s The Watermelon Woman, a movie about a Black queer filmmaker on a quest to discover hidden history while navigating her own complex relationships. Smith cites it as an influence and the actor Guinevere Turner, who played the white partner of the Black protagonist in The Watermelon Woman, also makes a notable appearance in Ride or Die as a bartender with a knack for telling tales.
The movie presents complicated questions and thoughtful possibilities, but there are no pat answers in Ride or Die, no neatly presented conclusions. It’s too good of a movie to end that way, and Smith’s too talented of a filmmaker to spoon-feed their audience.
As for Smith, they are already at work on their next film: a thriller that explores the terrifying right-wing nooks of the internet seen through a queer lens. They’ll be on hand Friday for a Q&A after the screening at the Hi-Pointe Theatre.
There’s an opening reception with appetizers and drinks at 6:30 p.m., with the screening starting at 7:30 p.m. and Smith’s appearance afterwards. Tickets are $15.
Melissa Meinzer is honored to serve on the board for Out In STL. You can find her online at @melissameinzer.bsky.social.
