The Mississippi Delta, 1932. Slavery is outlawed but to be black still means picking cotton and living in fear of the KKK. Yet to these badlands dapper, local gangster twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan à la Tom Hardy’s Ronnie and Reggie Kray) have returned from Chicago where they apparently found an equal opportunities boss in Al Capone.
This backstory explains the holdall of cash with which they buy an old saw mill and the truckload of Irish beer and Italian wine with which they will establish their new juke joint. It will ply punters with the best booze and blues in the delta. The opening night goes swingingly. Son of a preacher-man Sammie (Miles Caton) plays a mean steel-stringed guitar and despite his youth has a blues voice sweetened by the bitterness of black experience. Then the vampires strike.
Director Ryan Coogler, who helmed Marvel’s Wakanda movies and the first two Creed films – the unexpectedly very good Rocky follow-ups – has this time apparently been inspired by the freaky tale of real-life blues guitarist and singer Robert Johnson, of whom it is said that the devil gave him the choice, at a Mississippi crossroads, to sell his soul in exchange for success.
Sammy makes no such pact. But an anonymous narrator declares that he is in a long line of musicians who transcend the time and world in which they live. This notion later spawns the movie’s most audacious scene when the roof of Smoke and Stack’s jitney is raised by by the music in a thrillingly whirligig sequence during which the camera weaves through the ecstatic punters. Musicians are conjured from the past and future. All are black and connected to a heritage that includes a masked African shaman and the spinning turntables of hip hop. It’s a moment of magical thinking that connects cultures, eras and continents through music.
For one breathtaking moment it seems that Coogler is taking his audience on a new journey. Yet when the vampires arrive, it all gets rather familiar, even if flesh eaters turning up to the party as a banjo-pickin’ bluegrass trio admittedly adds both a sublimely seductive sound to Smoke and Stack’s fast-unravelling opening night and racial tension. But you leave both entertained and with the nagging sense an opportunity has been missed.
Sinners
Classification: 15
★★★
