Sinners

Writer/Director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther) has consistently demonstrated his ability to connect with movie audiences on both a narrative and emotional level. Still, nothing he has done before has resonated with as much pure movie-going satisfaction as his latest, which is a surprising claim, given that, excluding the fatally compromised Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Sinners is the filmmaker's weakest effort in terms of storytelling. That kinda, sorta doesn't matter, though. This all-in-one-day, supernatural thriller, historical fiction, goin'-into-business drama, Mississippi Delta blues/folk musical, between-the-wars/prohibition-era/Jim-Crow South period piece, vampire horror movie, is the most exciting, shaggy, messy, dirty crowdpleaser to shake up the catatonic megaplexes in years.

Coogler's go-to leading man, Michael B. Jordan, plays a dual role as identical twins Smoke and Stack, two enterprising hustlers who left their home in Mississippi to fight in World War I and then made a name for themselves running bootleg liquor in Chicago. After stealing money from Al Capone and setting up Irish gangsters to take the fall, Smoke and Stack return to their hometown, purchase an old mill from a smiling Klansman, and launch their new business venture: an out of the way juke joint for the local black community featuring fried catfish, cold beer, gambling, dancing, and blues music courtesy of their young guitar-playing cousin Sammie, known as "Preacher Boy" on account of his disaprooving minister father.

There's a ton of backstory here, and Coogler luxuriates in explaining it all, transforming what could feel like awkward exposition into one of the film's many thematic undercurrents: the importance, if not always the literal accuracy, of the oral tradition. The entire first hour of this 138-minute film is devoted to introducing the various characters and learning about their relationships with Smoke and/or Stack. These include Sammie, played by newcomer Miles Caton, whose sonorous voice provides showstopping power to the sequences in which he sings the blues without undermining his character's youth and naivety. The great Delroy Lindo plays an older bluesman named Delta Slim, whom Smoke and Stack convince to give up his reliable gig in town to play piano at their joint.

Smoke and Stack each left a woman behind when they departed town as young men, and now those relationships need to be reconciled. Hailee Steinfeld plays Mary, a light-skinned woman often mistaken for white, who became Stack's lover at a young age before he skipped town. Mary has just buried her mother, who watched over the young Stack when he was in trouble. Wunmi Mosaku plays Smoke's estranged wife, Annie, who runs a kind of shop providing the community with herbs, potions, and charms. A believer in the supernatural in many forms, her spiritual practice is a blend of traditions ranging from Christianity to Hoodoo to the power of positive thinking; she has been praying to keep Smoke safe for all these years.

That hint of otherworldly elements isn't introduced until the scene where Smoke and Annie reconnect, but it becomes prominent in the second half of the movie. At the midpoint, the principal antagonist literally drops in out of nowhere with no backstory whatsoever. This may have been less jarring for those who watch trailers and read pre-release press about movies than it was for me, as all the promotional material emphasizes that Sinners is a full-on vampire picture. Still, with all the time spent on setting up everyone else in this story, the film could have used some foreshadowing about the dark forces that will eventually face off against our heroes, especially since Coogler aludes to enough potential Earthy antagonists for more than one movie.

I loved the scene that introduces the villain, a folksinging Irish vampire named Remmick, wonderfully embodied by Jack O'Connell ('71, Unbroken, Little Fish). However, he enters the movie being chased by Choctaw vampire hunters, who seem worthy of at least a little backstory of their own—could one of them not have also had a connection with Smoke or Stack that would result in an indigenous vampire killer ending up in the main company trapped in the juke joint for the climatic third act showdown? I only ask because the inclusion of yet another spiritual tradition seems like it would have enhanced the proceedings, both narratively and thematically, without significantly adding to the running time or feeling sheohorned in for the sake of shallow representation. For, while this is unquestionably an African-American story, I loved how organically integrated its cast felt. This is not one of those contemporary period pieces that feels like it was cast by a diversity algorithm invented by some AI company for white Hollywood executives; this is a movie entirely populated by folks who all feel authentic to the story.

Not only does Steinfeld's Mary not feel like the token white chick in the movie, but two more in the main cast, Grace (American TV star Li Jun Li) and Bo (Singaporean movie star Yao), play US-born Chinese shopkeepers who have integrated into the Black community. The soon-to-be trio of vampires that try to get invited into the juke joint are all Irish immigrants who share a history of oppression with their prey, and use that commonality to appeal to the humans. They propose that Smoke, Stack, and the others in the Black community should reject the false promise of white America and join a true fellowship of eternally living creatures of the night. It's not quite as convincing an antagonist argument as Jordan's Killmonger made to Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa in Black Panther, but it's worthy of comparison. Coogler understands what 95 percent of blockbuster filmmakers have forgotten: villains must be at least as interesting as heroes, and the best way to make an exciting villain is to give them logical motivations that the audience can understand and even sympathize with.

Sinners has all that going for it, yet once the vampire action begins, nothing we see feels particularly original. It's fun, but it's a little unworthy of all the elaborate track Coogler laid out to get his story and characters to their big showdown. Most viewers of the Millennial generation or older will find it impossible not to think of From Dusk Till Dawn while watching the back half of Sinners. Coogler's multifaceted picture works on more levels than Rodriguez and Tarantino's '90s-era B-picture homage, but From Dusk Till Dawn not only got there first, it wasn't trying to do as much and therefore doesn't feel like it comes up short, which, unfortunately, Sinners does when it reaches its payoff.

While its inability to effortlessly weave every thread it sets up into a finale for the ages prevents Sinners from being Coogler's masterpiece, it doesn't significantly detract from the overall enjoyment of the movie. The fact that the climax is somewhat unsatisfying is well compensated for by the sequences leading up to it and the numerous epilogues that occur at the story's end and continue well into the credits. Before the vampires show up and spoil the big party, Coogler stages one hell of a shindig. Its centerpiece is a powerhouse number in which multiple forms of traditional Black music, from African tribal drumming to barrelhouse piano to George Clinton-style funkadelic to hip-hop, are all conjured by Preacher Boy's guitar. And after the main credits roll, we jump ahead in time to see what became of a few of the characters. This coda, as well as the actual finale before the end credits, fulfills much of the movie's promise, and it's fine that this key scene occurs after the main end titles. This is one of those 2+ hour movies that I would happily have watched for much, much longer.

Likewise, Coogler's choice to shoot the picture on celluloid IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70, which necessitates drastic aspect ratio changes when viewed in an IMAX theater, results in a somewhat less gimmicky combination of formats than is typical of the practice of blending IMAX and 70mm. The vast majority of Sinners is shot in the radically wide 2.76:1 Ultra-Panavision aspect ratio. I have no idea how that plays on a typical unmasked multiplex cinema screen, but in the IMAX theater I saw the film in, it looked fantastic. And while not every time the picture expands into the full 1.43:1 IMAX frame feels motivated, these shifts are far less random-seeming than in a Christopher Nolan picture. In addition to action sequences, the full-frame is utilized when the music takes center stage. One of the things I loved about this film is how much it allows its musical sequences to unfold without cutting away from the players or the depiction of how the listeners are experiencing the music.

Sinners isn't a musical per se, but it is a hell of a lot more musically satisfying than most of the bona fide musical films of late, like the inept Emilia Pérez and the unforgivably shity Wicked. Sinners is also a damn sexy movie. Though it lacks graphic love scenes, it has more than its share of sex talk, primarily focused on the finer points of cunnilingus. Like many of the Black filmmakers of the '90s that Coogler grew up watching, this director appears intent on making African-American sexuality and female sexual pleasure a key component of his storytelling—and it's great that these scenes are getting projected on some of the world's biggest movie screens.

Jordan has always possessed an alluring quality—his character in Creed was named Adonis for Pete's sake—and in Sinners he gets to play two variations on his charismatic screen persona. Rather than giving Smoke and Stack radically different personalities, as is often the case when the same actor plays a dual role, these two dudes feel cut from the same cloth. There is an inherent connection and similarity to them, like many twins possess, which makes the double casting feel less like a gimmick. Both men are slick, sharp, self-promoters with a great sense of fashion, but their unique experiences have shaped them somewhat differently as individuals. From the earliest scenes, Smoke seems to have a harder, darker edge than the more impish Stack. The reasons for this become clear as the film progresses and sets up the distinct fates of each character.

The renowned costume designer Ruth E. Carter, whose extensive body of work spans contemporarily-set films, including Do the Right Thing and Love & Basketball, period pieces ranging from Amistad to Selma, and fantasy films like Black Panther and Coming 2 America, brings her signature magic to all of these characters. Smoke and Stack look cool as hell without feeling out of time or place. Annie's three key looks in the film beautifully convey the distinct emotional states her character experiences at different stages. (I was unfamiliar with Mosaku, a Nigerian-born British actress mostly known for her TV work, but I look forward to seeing what she does next.) Steinfeld might have seemed an odd choice to play the impossibly sexy Mary, but decked out by Carter, she seems born to play the role. The 28-year-old actress first came to attention at age 13 for her Oscar-nominated turn in the Coen Brothers' version of True Grit, followed by her awkward teenage Juliet in Carlo Carlei and Julian Fellowes' not entirely successful attempt at an awkward teenage Romeo and Juliet. More teen roles followed with Ender's Game, The Homesman, the Pitch Perfect sequels, and her wonderful lead role in Kelly Fremon Craig's The Edge of Seventeen, but nothing she's done before prepared me for her in this role - Yowza! Coogler and Carter's attention to detail carries across all the characters, from the oversized overalls worn by Cornbread, the fieldhand turned bouncer played by Omar Miller (8 Mile, Things We Lost in the Fire, Miracle at St. Anna); to the blues singer Pearline, played by Jayme Lawson (Till, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, The Woman King), whose unassuming light cotton dress slowly transforms into a more colorful, revealing garment as her character becomes more self-possessed.

This attention to detail goes a long way in a big blockbuster movie like this. Similarly, the fun that Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Palo Alto, Wakanda Forever, The Last Showgirl) have with the large-format celluloid they're working with is infectious. Unlike most modern filmmakers shooting in 15-perf IMAX and 70mm, or resurrecting old formats like Ultra Panavision 70 and VistaVision, these folks don't seem to have an ounce of pretention about them, even though the subject and ideas they're exploring are no less weighty than those addressed in highbrow pictures like Oppenheimer and The Brutalist. Sinners could undoubtedly have been a better film if Coogler had either refined or expanded his screenplay a bit. Still, I delight in his skill at making thematic points clear and powerful without ever resorting to the didactic, exploitative, or simplistic social commentary that plagues so much "elevated horror" these days. Coogler is a filmmaker who understands that movies that succeed in entertaining can have far more impact than those that attempt to educate. Sinners may not be a perfect film, but it's a movie I can't wait to see again and again!