“It's just blues and Brecht.” This characterization of Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts was intended as a put-down, but it perfectly captures the film's genius. For Woodberry, the essential core of Brecht's alienation theory and practice was the notion of the gestus, the seemingly insignificant action that crystallizes for the spectator a whole complex of social relations. The humiliations of unemployment for a no-longer-young black man in south Los Angeles, a husband and father of three children, are too complex for him to unravel, but his tiniest gestures, the way he occupies the family bathroom, for example, reveal to the spectator everything to which he is blind. One scene even suggests a cause of his unemployment: he rides by the ruins of the recently closed Goodyear tire factory, which he scarcely notices. The blues, performed by Archie Shepp, Buddy Guy, and Little Esther Phillips with the Johnny Otis band, interrupts the action, as Brecht demanded, and provides us with some consolation, as it always does. Still, Brecht would have approved.