IBATS (Inspired By A True Story) movie Sarah’s Oil (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is of a far more tolerable brand of biopic. Instead of telling the story of a well-known sports, musical or political figure, it zooms in on a key point of Sarah Rector’s life – she was 11 years old when she, as a descendant of Creek Indians, was given 160 acres of Oklahoma land under the Treaty of 1866. The parcel was initially deemed worthless, but Rector struck oil and became the first American Black woman to become a millionaire. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh uses Tonya Bolden’s book Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America as a springboard for a faith-based story that drops in Zachary Levi as a fictional (composite?) character opposite young Naya Desir-Johnson, who shows remarkable precocity as the lead of a
...Keep reading this article on DECIDER.
