Starring Michael B. Jordan and Octavia Spencer. Rated 14A.

The unassuming Sundance film Fruitvale Station packs a punch so unexpectedly powerful that it’s hopeless trying to prepare for it.

It’s not just that the subject matter—a shooting at an Oakland, California, transit station—is as urgent as the recent Trayvon Martin verdict; it’s that the film so effectively humanizes the faceless African-American behind the headlines.

Ryan Coogler’s debut feature sneaks up on you even though he announces where he’s headed. Fruitvale Station opens with real-life cellphone footage of the frantic night when a transit cop shot an unarmed Oscar Grant in the back. Coogler backs up to dramatize the 12 hours that led up to the shooting—events so mundane that you won’t realize you’re becoming wrapped up in Oscar’s life and fate.

The low-key performance by Michael B. Jordan is full of human contradictions. In news reports that followed the shooting, Oscar’s mother talked about how her son had been trying to turn his life around. Coogler reveals that struggle in all its detail. He’s not just trying (and failing) to get his job back so he can stop dealing dope. There’s also the Oscar who slips extra snacks into his four-year-old’s lunch bag and shops for crabs for his mom’s birthday dinner. But he’s just as able to become the tough guy he once was in prison. Charismatic but with impulse-control issues, he has a good heart and a family that loves him.

Coogler gives these last hours an aura of foreboding. His shooting of the intense final act is especially engrossing, plunging us into the crowded, rowdy New Year’s train car, onto the fluorescent-lit station platform, and then into a hospital waiting room.

By this point, rest assured, Oscar Grant will be far from just another gunned-down black man.