A scene from Hold Your Fire (IFC Films)

This tense, involving documentary opens with a title card explaining how in 1973, four Black youths attempted to steal shotguns from a Brooklyn sporting goods store. A police officer spotted them, at which point the suspects took hostages and were holed up inside the store, leading to a standoff lasting nearly two days. Initially, director Stefan Forbes interviews the proprietor, Jerry Riccio, and police officers who remember the events. Together they paint a damning picture of the robbers as radicals, terrorists, and cop killers. (The four were members of the Black Liberation Army.)

The film then cuts to Shu’aib Rahim, the supposed leader of the gang of thieves, who directly refutes what the previous subjects have said. He explains how he and his fellow suspects were in fact “squares” who held working-class jobs or were students or artists. (Rahim was employed in a subway token booth.) Moreover, Rahim claims that when police initially cornered the four, he attempted to surrender, but he was given conflicting orders, which led to an intense firefight breaking out and the death of an officer.

What Hold Your Fire accomplishes especially well is its objectivity. It never pushes too hard to exonerate or prove the guilt of any side. That the four suspects were in the store to rob it is never in doubt. However, Forbes highlights the four’s extenuating circumstances through in-depth interviews. Similarly, whether one believes the New York Police Department to be an instrument of racial injustice (and there was certainly ample feeling of that sort during the 1970s, the film argues), the filmmakers don’t settle with portraying the officers as merely trigger-happy; they highlight how those on-hand may have been traumatized after seeing one of their own killed.

The frequent use of archived news footage lends immediacy and helps ratchet up the tension, insofar as supporting interviewees’ claims that they were sitting on a veritable powder keg, figuratively and literally. Crowds of New Yorkers, many of them Black, can be seen gathering in droves with the occasional cutaway shot showing their anger and distrust toward the cops. (The events took place just after the Attica prison riot, in which a white police force put largely Black protestors to heel in a brutal, racist manner.) Fascinatingly, racial tensions were at play among the hostages as well—one of the women, who was Black, refused to leave the store because she didn’t trust that the cops wouldn’t kill her.

Although the main story line is the standoff, the incident also marks a very early instance of hostage negotiations being utilized by a police department. A recurring theme is the clash between what could be considered the old-school approach to conflict resolution—going in with guns blazing and asking questions afterwards—and the newer model pioneered by NYPD psychologist Dr. Harvey Schlossberg (featured prominently here—he passed away in 2021), which preached open lines of communication and maintaining calm. Many twists and turns are due to rank-and-file cops opting for the former method against Schlossberg’s direction, though they aren’t the only ones conflicted. Indeed, at one point Riccio secretly gets his hands on a firearm and must decide whether to use it.

At the start of the film, subjects come across as archetypes. In Riccio’s case, he’s that tough-as-nails Brooklyn guy who, even with a gun in his face, has the moxie to talk back to the person wielding it. Yet over the course of Hold Your Fire, hostages, hostage takers, and law enforcement alike are faced with either giving in to primal fears or opting for a more rational path. Through their respective decisions, each protagonist has the opportunity to transcend clichés, and seeing them do so elevates the experience of watching this film above that of just another true-crime documentary.