MoviesMoviesThere’s nothing quite like a director freed from the shackles of franchise filmmaking who’s got plenty to say
Warner Bros./Ringer illustration
By Adam NaymanApril 18, 12:09 pm UTC • 7 min
Talking to LeBron James recently in Interview magazine, Ryan Coogler used a culinary metaphor: “I want people walking out of the theater and thinking, ‘Man, I had a full meal.’”
Compliments to the chef: Part Delta gothic, part musicological meditation, and part hard-R-rated gorefest—a real pulled-pork horror movie, with meat falling off the bone—Sinners is a cinematic smorgasbord. Its varied spread suggests a filmmaker in thrall to his increasingly outsized appetites as a social critic and a showman; it’s the sort of film you have to chew on for a bit to fully digest.
Coogler has always been a formidable talent, emerging out of USC with a knack for yoking visual poetry to polemics (his breakthrough short, Locks, briskly treats themes of cultural identity and erasure with a clever final twist). Now, working on a massive, IMAX-sized canvas—and liberated from the expectations and compromises of his extended gig with Marvel—Coogler has delivered what is by far the strangest film of his career, a fascinatingly distorted mirror image of populist knockouts like Creed and Black Panther. Those movies gave viewers exactly what they wanted but made that satisfaction feel like an actual gift rather than a bribe. With Sinners, the director is playing a different game. He’s forcing the broad mainstream audience he’s cultivated to meet him fully on his own eccentric terms. That the results are imperfect doesn’t matter because they’re so often exhilarating.
Sinners is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, circa 1932, deep in the throes of Jim Crow. In his first period piece, Coogler luxuriates in vintage textural and architectural details without succumbing to the elaborate dress-up fetishism of Guillermo del Toro. The screenplay is located at the intersection of myth and history, the same neighborhood explored by the Coen brothers in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, to which Sinners’ wild, surrealist fable could be seen as a conceptual companion—or a retort. Both films are showbiz allegories interpolating the legend of Robert Johnson, who supposedly bartered with the devil in order to master his instrument. The difference is that, where the Coens used Johnson’s persona in counterpoint with a story about good-natured white convicts turned folk superstars, Sinners deals directly—and metaphysically—with the question of Black artists forced into a dance between assimilation and appropriation.
Sammie (Miles Caton)—known colloquially as Preacher Boy—is a young guitar slinger harboring dreams of stardom as a blues performer; not yet out of his teens, he’s already adept at inhabiting old-school, worn-to-the-bone ballads. His escapist fantasies are fueled by the exploits of his older cousins, Smoke and Stack, a pair of identical twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan in a CGI-assisted dual performance) who parlayed their World War I service into high-earning careers adjacent to Al Capone in Chicago. Handsome, streetwise, and mutually voluble, the so-called SmokeStack twins have a reputation as local antiheroes. They’ve returned home as potential entrepreneurs: As the film opens, the brothers are trying to open a new after-hours juke joint to serve as a hub for Clarksdale’s sprawling—if cash-strapped—community of sharecroppers and small businessmen.
More on ‘Sinners’
More on ‘Sinners’
Smoke and Stack admire Sammie’s skills and hope to book him alongside more seasoned entertainers during an opening-night party lubricated by crates of ill-gotten booze. They’re also hoping to toughen their cousin up a bit, which means being honest not only about the busted-up racial and social politics of their home turf, where a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan already has a foothold, but also about the similarly treacherous dead ends that lie beyond it. When Sammie asks them about Chicago, they scoff and tell him it’s pretty much the same as Clarksdale, except with taller buildings.
The technical brio required to have Jordan so consistently and convincingly share the screen with himself is considerable, and Coogler keeps finding witty ways to frame his suave dead ringers. There’s a great, deadpan bit where one twin hands the other a cigarette as the camera hovers slowly past. Working with Coogler tends to bring out the best in Jordan, who’s got the right kind of coiled, ambiguous swagger to embody self-made and ethically impaired gangsters. (The costume design by the great Ruth E. Carter also does wonders to differentiate the characters from scene to scene.) The most remarkable performance, though, belongs to Caton, an R&B performer making his acting debut. It’s Sammie who provides the movie with its point of view, and Caton evokes the excitement and anxiety of a talented kid in such a hurry to come of age that he risks betraying the very tradition that inspired him in the first place.
The question of whether Smoke and Stack have good intentions for Sammie—and whether they’re posturing cynics, seen-it-all realists, or authentic Good Samaritans—haunts the early sequences of Sinners, which unfold at a surprisingly laconic pace. The idea is that the brothers are trying to beat the clock in order to get the barn they’ve purchased at the edge of town ready by sundown, but Coogler is taking his time. The graceful, floating camera movements map the space of Club Juke as it fills up, obliging us to note the dark corners and exit routes; they also glide past a host of vivid peripheral characters, including the twins’ two genuinely complex love interests. There’s beautiful, wayward Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a biracial, white-passing woman with a twisty backstory that winds around Stack’s own checkered past; she shows up dressed to kill in a slinky silver ensemble but is anxious about making a move on her ex. There’s also Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s former partner, who’s nursing an even deeper sense of hurt and also happens to be an expert on supernatural matters—which comes in handy once Coogler’s script lays its tarot cards on the table.
On the one hand, a movie as patiently and carefully plotted as Sinners obliges critics to tread carefully through spoiler territory. On the other, it’s being actively sold in trailers as a violent vampire siege movie, and there’s no way to talk around its genre elements, which are hiding in plain sight from the early image of a character clutching a broken guitar neck like a jagged wooden stake. Coogler isn’t trying to fool anybody with the slow burn so much as draw out the pleasure of heavy, dread-inflected suspense.
Club Juke is a utopian vision, which—by definition—means it’s also fragile. The SmokeStack twins aren’t just putting their money and reputations on the line but potentially exposing their community to danger. (The movie would make an interesting double bill with Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, another sensuous, period-specific account of an all-night dance party.) As the night begins, they have reason to worry that some Klansmen might drop by unannounced, and they recruit freelance security guards to keep watch. The white interlopers who arrive instead come bearing instruments and multipart vocal harmonies rather than hoods and burning crosses. They look harmless (and gormless) enough. What’s unnerving is their insistence—at first polite and then impatient—that the patrons of Club Juke invite them inside to join the party.
The obvious touchstone here is Near Dark, with Kathryn Bigelow’s punky, denim-clad bloodsuckers swapped out for ostensibly God-fearin’ church-mouse types. Indeed, the needling gentility of the main vampire—the pale, ingratiating Remmick (Jack O’Connell)—is Coogler’s most inspired touch. Remmick’s villainy is twofold: He not only wants to tap his neighbors’ carotid arteries but also wants to suck their subculture dry. Crucially, these predations come couched in claims of solidarity. Remmick is determined to show Sammie and Co. that he can carry a tune. At first, Coogler plays these performances for satire, juxtaposing O’Connell’s twee Emerald Isle lilt with the ferocious energy of Club Juke’s headliners (not just Sammie but also veteran bluesman Delta Slim, played with scenery-masticating brilliance by Delroy Lindo). Later on, though, after the vampires have fortified and diversified their ranks by picking off stragglers caught on the wrong side of the barn door after dark, their group performances intensify into a grotesque parody of homogenized (and deracinated) musical styles. It’s a provocative, paranoid fantasy. Call it: Invasion of the Blues Snatchers.
There’s a lot to deconstruct here, starting with Coogler’s impulse to divide his own artistic persona between Smoke and Stack according to their conflicting views on art and commerce. In a wonderful touch, Remmick’s crew tries to buy access to Club Juke with ancient gold pieces—symbolic currency—which Coogler juxtaposes against the not exactly monetizable plantation tokens proffered by the Black patrons. Making a $90 million movie about the slippery, transactional nature of American popular culture is a bold gesture, and so is cultivating an abundance of springing, multidirectional chaos in the homestretch. Ultimately, Sinners spins out of control in ways that arguably undermine the intellectual side of Coogler’s project while emphasizing his gift for visceral action—a trade-off that Warner Bros. can probably live with. But in a movie year that promises to be partially defined by big swings from popular auteurs—from Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—Sinners arrives right on time as a swirling and original vision.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’ is available now from Abrams.
