Spark (1998)

Academy Award nominee Terrence Howard and Nicole Ari Parker star as a young African American couple who must find a way to survive when their car breaks down in a backwater, violent racist town.Byron (Howard--Hustle & Flow) and Nina (Parker--King's Ransom) are driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, where Nina plans to start college, when they are forced to stop in a small, desert place just this side of a ghost town. Unaccustomed to confronting racism and bigotry on the scale preserved in this rural anachronism, Byron's confrontational response to slurs, epithets and threats quickly leads to a fight for survival -- and the Chicago couple is alone and outnumbered.