In “Sinners,” writer-director Ryan Coogler blows a horror-movie template up into a rich fantasia of music and passion and parable and atrocity. It is an enormous, exhilaratingly ambitious and overwhelming undertaking. Buckle up. We’ve got ourselves a juicy, horny, funny, violent and volatile blockbuster, with brains and brio and style.
It is 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the Devil for his powers with the guitar. This setting is not incidental to the narrative. Coogler has internalized that mythology and its ramifications, especially of the blues as a response to the savagery of Jim Crow. It could and has been said that the blues, which is essentially the beginning of rock and jazz and too many other musical movements to count, is an agent of exaltation that is also born of monumental cruelty and tragedy. That uncomfortable irony drives “Sinners.”
Coogler cuts to the heart of that irony in the opening scene. Sammie (Miles Caton) rushes into his father’s church while it is in the midst of service. He’s battered and bloody, holding a guitar that’s splintered into a sharp nub. The young man’s soul is embodied by two symbols: the guitar and its rush of expression and possibility, as a gateway into a lurid world of clubs and booze and crime and women, and the cross as a means of purity and steadfastness in a land haunted and hunted by the Klan.
Coogler flashes back to the day before, with most of the movie sketching in how Sammie came to his own crossroads. His cousins are Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), aka the Smokestack Twins, local legends who fought in the First World War and migrated to Chicago and worked in the shadowy empire of Al Capone. It is unusually pleasurable to summarize this movie’s plot. The details are rich and delicious, with a savory and novelistic sense of texture.
In the first hour, Coogler sketches in a vivid world of people of color, including Chinese and Choctaw communities, that lives enclosed within Jim Crow [laws]. Coogler makes oppression casual, insidious, allowing you to see racist signs out of the corner of your eye, or to understand how thoroughly the possibility of violence is ingrained in the behavior of the characters. And yet he does not reduce these characters merely to their struggles. Smoke and Stack are suave outlaws who think little of pulling a gun on the Grand Dragon who sells them a piece of land for their juke joint. That bit gives you an idea of how thoroughly and uncomfortably Coogler has imagined this world, showing collaborations that exist whether or not we find them palatable.
Smoke and Stack recruit talent for their juke joint, allowing Coogler to gradually reveal his expansive cast. We see them negotiating for catfish, for a sign, for the talents of a boozy bluesman played by the indelible Delroy Lindo. Each twin has a lost love. For Stack, there’s Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a beautiful biracial woman who passes for white, whom he left behind so that she may enjoy the ostensible freedom of that white life. For Smoke, there’s Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a medicine woman who believes in old customs, talismans, prayers and intimations of doom. In an hour, Coogler sketches in a dense community, defined by a thicket of resonant interrelationships.
The juke joint opens that evening, and Coogler outdoes himself, turning “Sinners” into a phantasmagoric concert film. Have you ever watched a great blues concert hoping it would turn into an orgiastic horror movie that somehow only deepens the poetry of the music? Probably not, but “Sinners” reveals that you should have.
The sound design of this movie is as lush and fine-grained as its vibrant and hallucinatory cinematography. Music feels like a material, even corporeal force here. Coogler lingers on the musicians as they play; on the patrons as they drink and dance, the camera snaking along the planks and corridors of this large shack out in the middle of the woods and descendant darkness. Coogler makes you taste the sweat of the players, the dancers and drinkers. He makes you taste that beer and frying fish.
In a lamer and less imaginative story, Sammie would be a bland and innocent foil to the Smokestack Twins. Instead, he slips away to go down on a married woman before his turn on the stage. The Smokestack Twins might stand up to Jim Crow, and they are intensely protective of their loved ones, but they are also out to satisfy their own hunger for power. They see the means of warfare against Jim Crow to be raw capitalism, which is going to be difficult for a rational adult to contest.
These are swaggering characters, with the balls and heat of Blaxploitation heroes, animated by a cast that’s sensational, from top to bottom. These aren’t simps patronizingly imagined for a message movie. Coogler gives the profound pleasure of gratifying hunger, regardless of productivity or morality, its due. This is an unusually sexy, sensual modern movie, as it is in touch on a primordial level with the intersection of lust and art and politics and money and race.
Running 137 minutes, “Sinners” takes its time—purposefully. Coogler roots you in the earthly folklore of this world, establishing this movie as folklore itself. He is not afraid to shake the rafters of this reality to hint at a larger sense of cosmic magic. When Annie tries to reason with Smoke, the sound mix vibrates with mysterious power. When Sammie plays at the juke joint, his talent obliterates distinctions of time, blurring the past, present, and future of all implications of the blues and even of music of many other cultures. Things matter in this movie, and music and sex in particular are understood to have soul-altering power, especially in the passing down of culture—good and bad.
We’ve already got enough here for 10 movies when Coogler ups the ante with Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a vampire who steers this superb piece of historical fiction into “From Dusk ‘til Dawn” territory. Again, in a lamer and simpler movie, Remmick would be an easy metaphor for Jim Crow, a white devil who embodies the blending of violence and transcendence driving the blues. Remmick is all that, but he isn’t only that.
Remmick isn’t simply “white,” he’s explicitly Irish, which is to say that he has some idea of living as an undesirable in America. When this vampire makes his plea to the Black characters to join him, trading oppression for a hive-mind communism that’s powerful enough to wipe out the Klan over a long weekend, he knows which buttons to push. His is the classically tempting pitch: to counter evil with evil.
The second half of “Sinners” is driven by an audacious concept. Remmick is also a musician, and the bluegrass he plays with his vampire horde is allowed to be beautiful. How easy would it have been for Coogler to make sport of the white musicians as usurpers to Robert Johnson’s throne? Too many white musicians and producers have profited from Black musicians who didn’t make a nickel. But the vampires are understood to be parasites that also make lovely music, and as Black characters succumb to Remmick’s power, the music becomes more complex and ornate—epic.
The metaphoric possibilities in these situations are virtually bottomless. You can read these plot turns as symbols of gentrification, of the white population’s theft of Black music, of even the “post-racial” platitudes we’re encouraged to adopt now in the name of good behavior that effaces our various respective cultural identities. I’m sure “Sinners” is going to be chewed over plenty in the approaching weeks and years. Coogler is an artist who is mature enough to see that art can spring from bloodied soil and still be soul-nourishing. That’s the riddle of this movie and of our culture.
This sense of a genre movie as a free-flowing ornamental party as the history of Black culture—Coogler tried to get all this into his “Black Panther” movies too. It didn’t work as well in those cases; even a filmmaker as talented as Coogler is going to have a hard time circumventing the burdensome nonsense that comes with Marvel.
Simpler templates, whether it’s the horror siege film here, or the “Rocky” formula in “Creed,” give Coogler the space on which to build his biospheres. In these debauched times, in which filmmakers either sell out or give up on reaching audiences outside of their cults, Coogler is a rare auteur of pop cinema—which is to say, a mythmaker.
“Sinners” is now in theaters everywhere.
