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if we could take a piece of hair and find it, then we could treat it prophylactically and then maybe you don't get it," he says. "What I am most proud of his the way we have galvanized this community. We can get stuff done. "I just want to get this done," he says about finding a cure.

When I spoke to Fox, he was getting ready to travel to Las Vegas to attend the Tyson Fury/Deontay Wilder boxing match. Then he was off to Canada to visit his 92-year-old mom for the first time since the pandemic.

That does come at a cost for the pacing of Sinners. While the second half of the movie truly feels alive with energy, the first half feels a bit slow. To be more accurate, I would actually call it deliberate. There isn’t a scene that feels extraneous, with the exception of the first scene, making the pacing feel methodical and purposeful. Cutting any of those scenes would hurt the second half of the movie, but the reality is that making it to that point isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. The film is only a little over two hours, but the first half feels like it drags on for a bit longer than it should.

I was appreciating the period piece drama and the respect the film had for jazz and music in general, but it wasn’t until we reached a particular musical number at roughly the halfway point that everything clicked into place. The random discussions on music as a transcendental experience and how it can bridge generations and cultures, quite literally, all come together in a wonderful scene done in a single take. The screen, which had a widescreen presentation (at least in the IMAX theater I saw it in) for standard scenes and dialogue, fully enveloped the entire picture as music and dance overtook every inch of it in an explosion of color and song. That single moment will probably be one of my favorite scenes of any movie this year, and it was by far the best part of the film.

"Around a year and a half after my accident, I had come to the point of realizing that walking was not going be a very functional thing for me to keep pursuing and it was time to look into everything else the wheelchair world had to offer. And I had all of these people giving me offers to come play adaptive sports and try them out but I was pushing it back. And I finally realized it's time to just live life."

He works out in his wheelchair, and plays adaptive tennis and basketball in his chair as well. He swims using his upper body and has surfed waves in Santa Cruz, California while strapped to a kayak. And when CBS News met him at University of Denver, he was training for a marathon, entering the wheelchair race. The university allowed Mason to keep his stationary bike, which he powers with his hands, in its spin classroom. He also has a hand-powered bike that he rides along trails near the college to train.

But building these bridges to community takes energy, and today's young men do not seem to be constructing these relationships in the same way that they used to. In place of neededness, despair is creeping in. Men who are un- or underemployed are especially vulnerable. Feeling unneeded “is actually, in some cases, literally fatal," Reeves said. “If you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives, they are worthless and useless." Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of men have died of drug overdoses, mostly from opioids and synthetics such as fentanyl. “If the level of drug-poisoning deaths had remained flat since 2001, we'd have had 400,000 fewer men die," Reeves said. These drugs, he emphasized, are defined by their solitary nature: Opioids are not party drugs, but rather the opposite.

Marc J. Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive: Today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger. Parents are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of communication. “My wife and I have texted 10 times since we said goodbye today," Dunkelman told me when I reached him at noon on a weekday. “When my 10-year-old daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a phone notification about it."