“It’s truth, and sometimes truth isn’t what you want to see all the time, what you want to hear,” actor Algee Smith says. “It’s ugly.”

He’s talking about Detroit, the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal drama about a notorious 1967 incident in which a group of young, unarmed black men and two white women were brutalized by police—and three of them were shot dead—at the Algiers Motel. The 22-year-old Smith anticipates that the film will be “difficult for people to sit through,” and perhaps he’s right; the movie ended up ranking No. 8 at the box office its opening weekend, despite largely positive reviews. But regardless of audience turnout, says Smith, “the thoughts that are triggered are the important part, what they’re thinking when they leave.” The movie, he says, should inspire “self-examination: ‘Am I doing anything that furthers this horrible mind-set? Or am I actually helping?’”

While Detroit hasn’t become one of the summer’s runaway moneymakers, Smith can count himself its breakout star. There’s little denying the power of his leading performance as Dramatics frontman and Algiers victim Larry Reed. A relative newcomer to the big screen who until now was best known for starring as Ralph Tresvant in BET’s The New Edition Story (and the 2012 Disney Channel original Let It Shine), Smith has the emotional accessibility and versatility necessary to embody the 18-year-old Reed through Detroit’s punishing 140-minute running time. He is the film’s heart and soul—or as Bigelow writes Vanity Fair by e-mail, its “emotional spine.” That position makes his deterioration at the hands of an unjust justice system even more wrenching.

Smith recalls meeting the real-life Reed after filming Detroit. The aged Motown singer-turned-church choir director laughed at him upon first glance: “You got the swag. They did good on picking you for me. You’re gonna play me real good.” Now, sitting in the Bowery Hotel’s lobby lounge in downtown Manhattan, Smith sports an oversized black Moschino tee and tattered blue jeans, paired with a silver chain necklace and gold watch. A thin beard traces his jawline into a tightly trimmed goatee and mustache; he wears a slight, right-facing part in his hair. An oncoming cold has caused him to cancel and postpone other interviews, and he nurses his throat with a Patron-cranberry juice in one hand, a hot tea in the other. His first real press run has led to a long week; as he puts it, “shit has been crazy.” But now the actor-musician—who also performs a song, “Grow,” with Reed on the Detroit soundtrack—is re-centering and recuperating for a sold-out show at SOB’s in SoHo. Even in sickness, the swag is evident.

A born performer to a musician father (who coincidentally toured playing guitar for New Edition) and a fashion designer mother, he moved from Michigan to Atlanta at age 8 in part to get formally started in the arts. (Smith was also writing raps from a young age, but eventually matured into a soulful crooner.) Smith says working in Atlanta allowed him to “perfect my craft” with a string of guest stints on locally filmed series, including his Disney outing five years ago. But it wasn’t until his move to Los Angeles at age 20 that “everything just started lining up for me.” Now living out west with his parents and four of his siblings, it seems like continued successes are inevitable. (Unsurprisingly, Smith has at least one thing in the pipeline that he stays contractually tight-lipped about.)