Sinners
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 2 hours 17 minutes
Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku
Writer/Director: Ryan Coogler
In Theaters and Streaming
If you hurry, in many cities you can still catch Ryan Coogler’s head-spinning concoction of brotherhood, Mississippi Blues, and blood-sucking vampires the way it was meant to be seen: on the biggest movie screen possible in the company of fellow moviegoers who will scream, laugh, cry, and jive along with you until the final wondrous frame of 70-millimiter IMAX film has slipped behind the projector shutter.
Short of that, I’m here to direct you to your home streaming service, where this early favorite for a Best Picture Oscar is now unspooling in all its grinding, grandiose, occasionally grotesque glory.
Meet Elijah and Elias Moore, twin brothers known to one and all, respectively, as Smoke and Stack (both played, thanks to seamless digital effects, by Michael B. Jordan). The brothers drive a fine car and dress nattily, befitting their recent history as apprentice gangsters in Chicago. Upon arriving in their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the pair announce their intention to open a juke joint in a nearby barn.
Not only did the brothers seal the real estate deal that very morning — buying the barn from a defiantly transparent racist landowner (Dave Maldonado) — but they’re also planning to open their impromptu road house that very night.
The ambitious plan involves a frenzy of activity. Stack heads off to assemble a band — rounding up a steel guitar-and-vocal prodigy nephew named Sammie (Miles Caton), and Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a piano-and-harmonica playing Bluesman. Along the way, Stack convinces a burly, mild-mannered cotton picker named Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), to walk off the job and work as their doorman/bouncer for the night.
Smoke, meanwhile, heads into town to enlist old friends Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao), who run the general store, to paint a sign and provide food. His last stop is at the home of his ex, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku). Following a somber moment at the grave of their daughter, he talks Annie into signing up as the juke joint’s bartender/fish fryer.
Finally, the patchwork team converges at the barn, ready to make some music and raise some hell.
Speaking of Hell, I did mention, didn’t I, that this is a vampire movie? Indeed, so engaging are the characters and so focused are they on their musical mission the audience could be forgiven for failing to remember they are all marching, unwittingly, into a vampire-provoked bloodbath. That notion might also tempt the faint-hearted to give Sinners a pass, but I submit that would be a mistake: It is when the vampire storyline finally kicks in that the true vision of Sinners — its rich, dark lessons about white appropriation of Black culture and the often-irresistible temptation to embrace it — comes into gritty, grueling focus.
The vampires arrive in the person of three white musicians, played by Peter Dreimanis, Lola Kirke (Mozart in the Jungle), and Jack O’Connell (Unbroken), who stand at the juke joint’s doorway, perform a jaunty Irish folk song — and ask to come on in. Annie, who’s attuned to all things supernatural, senses something wrong: Evil entities, she warns, often must wait for permission to enter the dwellings of their victims.
Needless to say, despite such suspicions, the vampires find a way to keep things, shall we say, interesting. A Good-Versus-Evil battle royale ensues, a blood bank’s worth of hemoglobin is splattered, and as various characters shift from one realm of existence to the other, stark lessons in love, friendship, tradition, and loyalty are not so much learned as scrawled on the walls and floor of this roadhouse on the Highway to Hell.
As Smoke and Stack, Jordan gives not one but two remarkably realized performances. Smoke is a man haunted by emotional demons, still smothered by the years-old loss of his child. Stack is edgy and impulsive but intentionally upbeat—a guy who has clearly been talking himself out of trouble his whole life.
Maddeningly, there can be no standout performances in a cast that is uniformly perfect: Caton, a well-regarded musician making his acting debut, is as much a pleasant surprise to us as he is to Stack when Sammie first pulls out his steel guitar. As Blues master Delta Slim, Lindo (Get Shorty) evokes centuries of cultural pain with nothing more than closed eyes and a tightened mouth. As Smoke’s tragic love, Annie, Mosaku (Lovecraft Country) conjures an aura of life-worn mysticism; a sense of knowing that is at once commanding and vulnerable.
Post-credit scenes seem to have become de rigueur at the movies these days, so take this as an order: Do NOT budge from your seat until the very, very end, and by that I mean the MPA rating card. Writer/director Coogler (Black Panther) quite literally leaves the story’s culmination for what can only be termed after the end. If you leave before it, you’ve missed a good part of the film.
Any movie about a crew of musicians and their rapturous audience requires extended musical segments, and Sinners offers more than a few, including one jaw-dropping five-minute segment that steps out of the time-space continuum to trace the history of Black music in America. The sequence arrives unexpectedly, and instead of removing us from the immediacy of the narrative, it cements the sense that Sinners is about a lot more than juke joints and vampires. When the numbness of what you’ve just experienced these two-hours-plus wears off, you’ll spend a week thinking about every minute.
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