THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET

A mute space alien crash-lands his ship on Ellis Island. Other than his three-toed feet, which he keeps covered, he resembles a human. Because of his torn clothing, he is also viewed as a destitute person. His extraterrestrial powers are shown in many encounters; when he lays his hand on a wall, he can hear the voices of those who once filled a building – he cannot speak but he can listen with terror and sympathy. Misunderstanding the transactions in a mom-and-pop shop, he begins eating a pear (he is a vegetarian); when the shopkeeper begins screaming at him in Korean, he magically opens the cash register and hands her money from it, but this leads her to shout for the police. When pursued by a police officer down the street, he leaps to a high perch on the wall and the officer cannot find him.

He manages to blend in with the people he encounters and engages in one-sided conversations with various denizens of New York City. In a memorable scene, he meets a card trickster (Fisher Stevens) on a train who accepts his silence and hesitance to select a card; the trickster narrates a fast funny story involving the face cards, then departs, showing the Brother that some New Yorkers are simply amicable and amusing without wanting anything in return.

The Brother wanders into Odell's local bar in Harlem, where he becomes friends with Odell (Steve James) and the regulars, Walter (Bill Cobbs), Smokey (Leonard Jackson), and Fly (Daryl Edwards). Able to heal wounds and fix machines by touching them, he repairs an arcade cabinet and its video game, to the delight of Fly. Sam (Tom Wright), a social worker, secures him housing as a boarder with single mom Randy Sue Carter (Caroline Aaron) and her son, Little Earl (Herb Newsome). Later, he gets the Brother a job as a handyman and technician at a video arcade. When he fixes a game to make it fast enough to satisfy young gamer Ace's desire for speed, the Brother smiles for the first time.

One day, two men in black (John Sayles and David Strathairn) enter Odell's bar with the Brother's picture and ask for his whereabouts. Smokey lets slip that they know the Brother but when Odell demands to see the men's police badges, they leave. A little later, two white sociology students come into the bar, where they sit beside the Brother and become drunkenly proud that they are communicating with the black race. Odell tells the Brother about the men in black; panicking, the Brother leaves at once and the next day he is out cleaning windshields rather than fixing video games.

The Brother sees flyers for beautiful singer Malverne Davis at a nightclub but cannot afford the cover charge. As he walks away, he finds two kids overdosed with needles in their arms. He tries the needle himself, and spends the rest of the night feeling high and ill. The next morning, he sees graffiti in a script that he recognizes as that used by refugees like him; excited, he uses his own blood to add to it. Later, he fixes all the dead appliances in a used good shop for cash, then brings Little Earl to a museum where there is a Harriet Tubman exhibition. He signs to the boy that he is a slave escaping from another planet.

Having seen drug abuse and its tragic effects, he reveals another power. He temporarily removes one of his eyes, leaves it on the stoop of the dealer's brownstone and uses it as a video camera. The two men in black, determined to recapture him, find him again at Odell's bar. In a showdown, the locals protect him and facilitate his escape.

He later finds the business executive supplying the drug dealers in Harlem and makes him watch through the eye to see the havoc that drug abuse wreaks on families and neighborhoods. The two men in black capture the Brother with an electronic device while he is leaving the executive's office. When hope seems lost and his captors are leading him away, the Brother reads street graffiti that was written by other escapees; he breaks away from the electronic hold and runs into an alley, where a crowd of his fellow aliens are waiting to defend him. The two men in black self destruct after seeing that they are outnumbered. The Brother points to the sky as if to say, "Are we going now?", to which one of the escapees gives a thumb down answer.