★★★ (3 out of 4)
Their meeting is a blatant provocation. “You think I’m exciting, right?” says Lula (Kate Mara) as she sidles up on the subway whisper close to Clay (André Holland), a Black stranger. “You’d like to be down with me,” she taunts, the racial slang from this red-lipped white siren meant to tease him into squirmy unease.
It works. And so for a while so does “The Dutchman," a fresh twist on “Dutchman,” the 1964 race play by Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, that became a 1966 film starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman, Jr. and directed by a white man, Anthony Harvey. For Baraka, Lula represented white America and its attempted seduction and destruction of Black manhood by assimilation or worse. It ended with Lula stabbing Clay in the heart and persuading passengers to throw his body on the tracks while she waits for her next Black victim. The cycle continues.
This fresh cinema twist on Amiri Baraka’s 1964 race play is a scarily relevant warning shot. You won’t be passive about its provocations. It dares you to engage.
“The Dutchman” is directed and updated to the present by Andre Gaines, known for making documentaries about Black historical figures, from Jesse Owens to Jackie Robinson. Gaines extends Baraka’s vision beyond the subway car, opening with Clay (Holland) in couples therapy with his wife Kaya (Zazie Beetz), who’s cheated on him. Their therapist Dr. Amiri (the reliably superb Stephen McKinley Henderson) asks if Clay would feel better by cheating on Kaya.
Dr. Amiri also does something intriguingly bizarre: he gives Clay a copy of Baraka’s play, prompting a meta exercise as Clay enters the subway and encounters Lula (Mara), an Eve with an endless supply of apples who tempts Clay before goading him with accusations of being an impotent Uncle Tom. She goes with him to a political fundraiser in Harlem for his pal Warren (Aldis Hodge) and, with Kaya in attendance, does her best to cause chaos.
Instead, Clay riles up Lula, giving a speech extolling Warren and the Black community. At this point, Gaines directs his film into a surreal dreamscape in which Clay, with Dr. Amiri looking on, blends images of his current life with the Baraka play and even scenes from the 1966 film.
It’s a dizzying jumble, but an ardent and ambitious one. Holland, of “Moonlight” and TV’s “The Knick,” is an acting powerhouse catching the double consciousness of a man trapped in a defeatist pattern that compromises his Black identity. And the febrile Mara (“Megan Leavey,” “Friendship”) shifts Lula from sexual tease to dangerous antagonist with all stops in between.
As a title, “The Dutchman” evokes the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship fated to sail forever with no harbor in reach. Can Clay break the cycle? Or is he cursed to endure an ingrained racism and an eternity of Lulas? The future Gaines paints is far from hopeful. He doesn’t see Baraka’s play as a relic, but as a scarily relevant warning shot. Whatever you think about “The Dutchman,” you won’t be passive about its provocations. It dares you to engage.