Midway through Sinners comes a scene on the dance floor of a juke joint newly opened by twin gangsters-turned-entrepreneurs Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan). We’re somewhere on the outskirts of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, and onstage is a Delta blues band featuring the twins’ younger cousin Sammie (the remarkable newcomer Miles Caton) on guitar. As established in the movie’s first scene, Sammie is a prodigious guitarist and singer with a unique ability to place listeners under a kind of spell. That’s why his preacher father warns him to steer clear of the blues, a music the reverend believes comes from the devil. But it’s not until this dance scene that we get to see Sammie tap into his true power as a performer—the power not to summon demons from hell, but to bring together musical spirits from the past and future in a delirious alchemy that transcends time and space.
As Sammie plays, the jitterbugging locals are joined by a West African griot in traditional costume, a Jimi Hendrix–style electric guitarist, a trio of old-school breakdancers, a DJ working his turntables. The camera swirls through the crowd as these figures and their fellow partygoers in the Depression era come together in a transhistorical explosion of rhythm, movement, and joy. This extraordinary sequence isn’t a dream in any one character’s head, nor a collective vision shared by all the dancers, nor quite a visitation by literal ghosts (though other supernatural visitors will not be long in coming). Rather, it’s a visual manifestation of the countless musical and cultural bloodlines that flowed into and out of the great Black art form that is the blues. It’s as if, for a moment, the filmmaker’s ideas have taken on physical form so as to join the characters on that packed and sweaty dance floor.
It’s both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time.
That scene is perhaps the most salient example of what sets Sinners apart from your average Southern Gothic vampire thriller. As much as it’s a movie about bloodthirsty nocturnal monsters—and it contains no shortage of those—Sinners is a meditation on the deep roots of Black American popular culture, the lineage that runs from the griot tradition to Beyoncé and beyond. Sinners marks the first time Ryan Coogler, the director of Fruitvale Station, both Black Panther movies, and the first installment in the Creed franchise, has made a film that isn’t based on either real-life incidents or preexisting properties. This is a wholly original and deeply personal project, even if it is built on an epic scale, shot in 65-millimeter IMAX with the sweeping vistas of a classic Hollywood Western and stuffed with the elaborate action set pieces of a lavish contemporary blockbuster.
In telling the story of the twins, Mississippi natives who have just returned from a nine-year stint in the world of Chicago organized crime, Coogler is undertaking nothing less than an allegory about the Great Migration of the early 20th century, the flowering of the blues as an art form in both Chicago and the Delta region, and the mass trauma imposed by generations of Jim Crow laws and the constant threat of Ku Klux Klan violence. If that makes Sinners sound like a talky thought experiment rather than the raucous crowd-pleaser it is, note that these heady themes are interwoven with abundant jump scares, vampire smackdowns, and surprisingly frank sex scenes. Rarely has a mainstream action movie so explicitly foregrounded female pleasure, including with some cousin-to-cousin advice on how to go down on a woman—later followed to apparently well-appreciated effect.
Sinners takes place over the course of just 24 hours, but it nonetheless takes its sweet time to arrive at the action and horror elements of the story. The first half-hour or more is focused on the organization of the evening’s juke-joint shindig, as the brothers go in search of a team of entertainers and fellow party planners. Along with Sammie, there’s a harmonica player named Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a hard-drinking bluesman who’s drawn in by the brothers’ offer to pay him in Irish beer smuggled down from Chicago. A local woman, Pearline (Jayme Lawson), turns out to be a gifted blues singer—and a potential evening date for Sammie, even if she is married already. The town’s Chinese American grocer, Bo (Yao), and his wife, Grace (Li Jun Li), sign on to provide supplies and to paint the sign for the impromptu nightclub the twins are creating in a just-purchased former sawmill.
Each of the Smokestack twins, as the pair is known in the community, crosses paths that morning with a woman from his past. Stack’s onetime fling, Mary (a never-better Hailee Steinfeld), is of mixed race but passes for white. (Steinfeld herself is part Filipino and part Black on her maternal side.) She’s now married to a wealthy white man and living in Arkansas, but she’s returned to Clarksdale for her mother’s funeral. Smoke’s ex, Annie (the mesmerizing Wunmi Mosaku), runs a small shop out of what appears to be a former slave shack on a plantation. Annie’s specialty is folk remedies and talismans from the Hoodoo tradition; when Smoke comes to visit, they argue about her faith in the spiritual realm versus his understanding of life as a struggle for power. But they remain bound together both by a strong physical attraction and by the memory of the baby they lost in its infancy.
Six paragraphs into this review, we’re only now getting to the vampires—a fitting delay when discussing a movie that saves the bloodletting for its last act. As the residents of Clarksdale let loose on the dance floor, three white locals come a-knocking, requesting admission to the party. They are more than willing to pay the cover charge and even offer up their services as a musical act, whipping out a banjo to deliver a folk song from the Anglo-Irish tradition that was another antecedent of the blues. The brothers, rightly distrustful of these overly friendly intruders, turn them away at the door, but the folk trio lingers nearby, gradually attracting a small army of disgruntled locals throwing their own counter-celebration.
Events soon reveal that this group’s leader, Remmick (a darkly charismatic Jack O’Connell), is a powerful vampire whose aim is to make himself the center of a kind of undead cult. Above all—for reasons thematically rich enough that they’re never quite stated outright—the white vampires crave black converts to their cause, and Remmick’s most unsettling promise is the claim that the people he “turns” by drinking their blood will live forever in peaceful post-racial harmony. Sinners never gets scarier than in a moment three-quarters of the way through when a pack of bloodsucking true believers dance in a circle, in straight-armed Riverdance-style, to the strains of the old Scottish-Irish folk melody “Wild Mountain Thyme.”
The multifaceted depth of the allegory Coogler is spinning out here put me in mind of Jordan Peele’s Us and Nope, two horror epics that also used genre tropes (the uncanny double, the invader from outer space) to explore complex ideas about racial identity and systemic injustice. Not every big, bold choice on the director’s part serves the movie—the vampires’ final siege defaults to overfamiliar horror-movie imagery, and there is at least one action climax too many—but the boldness itself is enough to keep Sinners barreling forward at breakneck speed.
As Stack and Smoke endured fistfights, vampire feeding sessions, and attempted wooden-stake impalings, I found myself thinking of everything Michael B. Jordan has been through in the films of Ryan Coogler. He’s appeared in all five of them so far and already died more than once, first as Oscar Grant, the real-life victim of a police shooting, in 2012’s Fruitvale Station, and later as Killmonger, the unforgettable nemesis to Chadwick Boseman’s hero in Black Panther. In Creed, Jordan underwent brutal pummeling as the single-minded boxer determined to prove his worth as both an athlete and a human being. Now, in a challenging double role (one that’s far more nuanced than the good-twin–bad-twin dynamic suggested in the movie’s trailer, since both Smoke and Stack have their virtues and flaws), Jordan gets a chance to explore what it means to face death in a world where the worst fate of all is to be granted—or cursed with—immortality. No director has understood this actor’s specific blend of seductive charm, ferocious idealism, and latent capacity for danger the way Coogler has. When they’re working together, each brings out the best in the other, and Jordan emerges as a movie star in the classic Hollywood mold.
Sinners is an all-around triumph of craft, with stunning technical contributions from cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, composer Ludwig Göransson, and the Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter, all longtime Coogler collaborators. It’s both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time. If, in the end, the director’s reach ever so slightly exceeds his grasp—well, as Sammie learns that night onstage at the juke joint, pushing one’s art to the limit of possibility is always a risk worth taking.
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