Film Threat
By Bradley Gibson | July 30, 2025
Can’t Let it Go is a ground-level NYC snapshot of the days before and just after the 2016 election. The characters have relatable lives and real concerns, biases, and hopes for the country in a gentle wave of conversation that largely eschews the bombastic vitriol that characterizes the polarization we now endure.
Director-writer Roy Szuper’s comedy anthology Can’t Let it Go features five vignettes about New Yorkers contemplating the momentous 2016 U.S. presidential race a few days before the election.
The characters include a gay Black man working as a Trump diversity token, a dominatrix who campaigns for Hillary Clinton, a blue-collar independent who may or may not vote for Trump, a conservative Cuban immigrant waiter and his socialist daughter, and a Trump campaign manager and his British model girlfriend. The conversations have a distinctive NYC quality and reflect thoughts and feelings that were all around us before the U.S. entered the first Trump era.
Mario Cantone essentially plays himself as Bernie, partner to the Trump campaign token Black man, Clayton (Rick Younger). When they meet Bernie’s Jewish parents for dinner, it becomes clear that Bernie’s father is a Zionist bigot who is considering voting for Trump.