Judas and the Black Messiah

It’s difficult to find many movies about the politics and movements of the 1960s that aren’t sentimental simplifications at best, or blatantly inaccurate revisions at worst (or, as is the case of the previous year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, both). When these films center on race relations, they usually water down the truth of past events or choose to focus on narratives aimed at making contemporary audiences feel good about ourselves and how far we’ve come. Taking into consideration Hollywood’s dubious depictions of actual history, it is all the more surprising that a disciplined yet uncompromising film about the radical Black politics of the late-1960s could come out immediately after the explosive year 2020. Judas and the Black Messiah, director and co-writer Shaka King’s second feature, is a towering achievement both as an entertainingly edifying dramatization of historical events and an uncompromisingly critical exploration of racial injustice in America. 

Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Sicario, Queen & Slim) plays Fred Hampton, the young leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. The charismatic Hampton's oratory skills can win over politically disinterested audiences, and convince rival ethnic gangs and even white militia groups to stop fighting each other and form alliances in their common struggle against state repression. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) views African-American radicals as the gravest internal threat to America’s national security and fears that a popular, persuasive, rabble-rousing leader like Hampton might become a national “Black Messiah.” So an FBI Special Agent named Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) convinces a 19-year-old petty criminal named Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) to become an FBI mole and infiltrate the Panthers. O’Neal, never a politically active person up to this point, works his way up to become the head of security for Hampton.

If you know anything about Hampton, you know he didn’t live a long life. But, unlike the questions and conspiracy theories surrounding so many assassinations of great 1960s leaders, there was never any mystery about how Hampton died. He was killed in a police raid on his home, shot dead in his bed. O’Neal, on the other hand, is a figure few viewers will be familiar with—and it’s fascinating to see footage of the actual man from the iconic PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize in this picture. 

What sets this movie apart from so many run-of-the-mill docudramas is how King and his co-writers Will Berson and Kenny & Keith Lucas create their duel-protagonist structure. Just as the title implies, the movie follows the intersecting narratives of two real-life figures, letting the undercover crime thriller narrative of the informant’s story infuse and elevate the biopic drama of the civil rights leader. Movies about espionage are invariably more engaging than biopics, but King and company never let their ostensible villain upstage their hero. O’Neal may get a tad more screen time than Hampton, but the most dynamic scenes belong to the Black Messiah, not the Judas.

The two lead actors bring all the distinctive qualities we by now associate with each star. The sharp contrasts between their screen personas fit each character to a T.  Kaluuya instantly projects an accessible warmth and intelligence that draws you to Hampton, while Stanfield’s twitchy reserve makes O’Neal much more of an enigma. As with so many of his previous characters, Stanfield plays O’Neal as a man whose thought process and emotional life are knowable only to him, if even that. What goes on behind his eyes is far more fascinating than what he says. Whereas Kaluuya revels in Hampton’s verbal eloquence, on display both in his public and private speaking. There is no shortage of Oscar clips of Fred Hampton winning over a crowd, but this movie is far more than a collection of powerhouse speeches delivered by a great actor. The script has a deft understanding of the mood, culture and politics of its day and how they parallel and inform our own time. Neither Kaluuya nor the screenwriters deliver any of this commentary with the ham-fisted obviousness on display in most docudramas. These filmmakers know the contemporary relevance of Hampton’s words, beliefs, and actions, so they let the story speak for itself.     

The supporting players deftly reinforce the film’s themes. Dominique Fishback plays speechwriter and activist Deborah Johnson who becomes Hampton’s romantic and movement partner. Through her, the movie explores the humanity of a character that could have been painted in overly broad strokes as an actual Messiah. And in playing O’Neal’s FBI recruiter and contact, Jessie Plemons helps us understand the fear and complex moral conflict that motivates the titular Judas. We come to see him as just as much a victim of the country’s institutional white supremacist systems as anyone else.

I do wonder what this film might have been like if the leads had been played by actors as young as these characters actually were. Both actors are a good ten years older than the men they play, so we never get the full sense of how everything that unfolds in this film must have affected guys barely out of their teen years, but that is perhaps a nitpick. What makes Judas and the Black Messiah such an important and unusual historical film is its refusal to evade the radical politics of the story it tells. Rather than the simplistic depiction of the Black Panther party we’ve gotten in films from Forest Gump to The Trial of the Chicago 7, it illustrates the myriad ways this group advocated for social change—focusing as much on the guns as the breakfast programs. The film lays out how the struggle for Black liberation had the capacity to unite several political and multiracial movements at once, which is why the justice department deemed the organization a danger to the U.S. government. This same struggle has the same capacity today, and we see a similar powerful backlash, which is what makes it all the more important to understand the unique history and power of this movement.