★★★★ (4 out of 4)
If I had to stop the clock right now in May and hand out the Oscar for Best Picture, my choice would be “Sinners,” an artful provocation disguised as a blood-lusting vampire free-for-all. Leave it to the knockout team of actor Michael B. Jordan and director Ryan Coogler to have audiences lining up to sample their unique brand of cinema pow. That happens when a game-changer suddenly appears to shake things up in a multiplex drowning in formula. ”Sinners” is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s divisive, dangerous and primed to explode. I couldn’t have liked it more.
This game-changer from star Michael B. Jordan and director Ryan Coogler is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s divisive, dangerous and primed to explode.
Coogler daringly casts his creative muse Jordan as identical twins, known as Smoke and Stack. One broods, the other doesn’t, one wear a blue cap, the other burgundy, but they’re both on a mission. The time is a single day in 1932 and the brothers, having survived WW1 and prospered by mobbing up in Al Capone Chicago, return to their Mississippi home in Clarksdale to build a juke joint carved from the joy and pain of Black America, expressed in sultry, sinuous music that speaks hard truths.
Jordan and Coogler first teamed in 2013’s indie sensation “Fruitvale Station” (see review) then went the franchise route with “Creed” and “Black Panther” (Jordan played the villain Killmonger in what is still the only Marvel blockbuster to snag an Oscar nomination as best picture). You could call “Sinners” a vampire-gangster-western-musical, which it is. But what should be a tonal mess of genres at war with each other is shaped by Coogler into a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. Shot with Imax cameras, the film demands a monster screen and an audience of kindred souls ready to be riveted by a radical look at cultural assimilation.
Jordan differentiates his roles with calibrated precision. Both brothers are losers at love, Smoke with spiritual healer Annie (a terrific Wunmi Mosaku) and Stack with the married, passing-for-white Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld with enough come-on carnality to singe the screen.
Too messy for perfection, this Jordan-Coogler joint flies high on something no vampire can match: the immortality of its devil music. Get this score into your ear buds pronto, it’s the movie soundtrack of the year.
Sensuality is palpable in “Sinners,” with thrilling music permeating the movie like a living force, especially through the twins’ cousin Sammie, the son of a preacher man who condemns the pulsating beats as Satan’s tool. Newcomer Miles Catton, formerly a H.E.R. backup singer, plays Sammie with a dramatic and vocal brilliance that should ignite his young career. A great new song, “I Lied to You” (listen up, Oscar) gets you on your feet while it blows the roof clean off.
And it gets better. Firebrand Coogler outdoes himself in a sequence that transcends time and space, blending blues, jazz, funk and hip-hop into a swirling set piece in which musical giants of the ages come out to party. In the rickety barn Smoke and Stack have transformed into a church dedicated to the gods and monsters of sound, a turntable appears ready for scratching. Look, over here, it’s Jimi Hendrix shredding his guitar. And over there are breakdancers gyrating to their own tribal beat. The rhythm and the pulsating bodies are so hot the screen literally bursts into flames. How could it not? One word: euphoria.
Don’t worry. I didn’t forget about the vampires. But Coogler does for almost an hour, letting us wait for them like Spielberg did with the great white shark in “Jaws.” Coogler uses that hour to develop fascinating, flawed characters who refuse to sacrifice their infinite variety to serve as artery bait for Nosferatu wannabes. These non vamps include the reliably magnificent Delroy Lindo on harmonica and piano as Delta Slim and a radiant Jayme Lawson as young Pearline, a heartbreaker who sings the blues with such heat that Sammie is a goner.
When the bloodsuckers do invade, they don’t cheapen the movie or sell out its poetry for pap. Still, they do leave piles of bloody corpses ready to transform before the sun burns them into smoke and ash. They quickly form an army of the undead, led by a seductively menacing Jack O’Connell as an Irish folk singer and Riverdancer named Rennick, who must ask permission—per vampire rules— to be let in.
These supernatural stand-ins for white Klansmen are eager to torch a barn filled with Black folks. And they won’t stop there. Unlike Jordan Peele, the master social satirist behind “Get Out” and “Us,” Coogler sees little to parody about the bane of bigotry. And he improvises like a true jazzman.
Powered by double-blast acting from Jordan, sonic miracles from composer Ludwig Göransson, eye-popping costumes from Ruth Carter and sublime camera magic from Autumn Durald Arkapaw, “Sinners” builds a stone-soul slaughterhouse tempered by a tenderness you won’t see coming. Too messy for perfection, this Jordan-Coogler joint flies high on something no vampire can match: the immortality of its devil music. Get this score into your ear buds pronto— it’s the movie soundtrack of the year.
Though Coogler acknowledges his debt to 1996’s “From Dusk to Dawn,” a vampathon from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, “Sinners” is a big, wild, wholly original swing from a filmmaker who lives, breathes and feels every scene in his bones. You won’t know what hit you.
One More Thing: In the Trump era, nearly a century after the time “Sinners” is set, the predatory vampires of racism are still lurking outside the door asking to be let in with promises that will only make their prey complicit in their own destruction. How’s that for chilling message for our time?