A mute space alien crash-lands his ship on Ellis Island. Other than his three-toed feet which he keeps covered, he resembles a black human man and manages to blend in with the people he encounters, engaging in lopsided conversations with various denizens of New York City. He displays the ability to heal the wounds of himself and others, as well as fix machines, by holding his hand over the affected area. He is secured housing through a new acquaintance at a Harlem bar. After fixing an arcade cabinet there, he soon lands a job as a technician. Two men in black, keen on the mute alien's whereabouts, begin to track the places and interrogate the people which he has visited. They seek to return him to the planet from which he escaped.
Director John Sayles has described The Brother from Another Planet as being about the immigrant experience of assimilation. Extras from the film described it as "The Black E.T. movie." Sayles spent part of his MacArthur Fellows "genius" grant on the film, which cost $350,000 to produce.
Critical reception
Variety called The Brother from Another Planet a "vastly amusing but progressively erratic" film structured as a "series of behavioral vignettes, are genuinely delightful and inventive"; as it continues, the film "takes a rather unpleasant and, ultimately, confusing turn." Vincent Canby called it a "nice, unsurprising shaggy-dog story that goes on far too long" but singled out "Joe Morton's sweet, wise, unaggressive performance." Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, saying "the movie finds countless opportunities for humorous scenes, most of them with a quiet little bite, a way of causing us to look at our society", noting that "by using a central character who cannot talk, is sometimes able to explore the kinds of scenes that haven't been possible since the death of silent film." The A.V. Club, in a 2003 review of the film's DVD release, said the film's superhero scenes are "often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's 'alien' status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders"; commenting on the DVD, they noted its "marvelous" audio commentary track by Sayles, "who moves fluidly from behind-the-scenes anecdotes to useful technical tips to unpretentious dissections of his own themes." Paul Attanasio wrote: "Sayles is no storyteller; despite the verve of its language, The Brother From Another Planet eventually sags of its own weight. And all his movies are hampered by an almost shocking ignorance of filmmaking fundamentals -- he just doesn't know where to put his camera. The movie would have benefited from more attention to the bounty hunters, whose difficulties with Harlem culture would have balanced the Brother's strange ease of assimilation. Instead, the plot takes a centrifugal turn as the Brother roots out a scag baron whose drugs are poisoning the community."
