Sinners

There’s a moment early in “Sinners” when the delightfully named Smokestack twins, Smoke and Stack Moore, are leaning against their 1932-appropriate car and passing a cigarette back and forth. Having taken great pains to know nothing about Ryan Coogler’s fifth feature film before seeing it, in this moment I honestly thought to myself, “Where’d they get that other actor who looks so much like Michael B. Jordan?” The answer is that through some nimble feat of computer-generated sleight of hand, they are both played by Michael B. Jordan, as inherently sensational as symbolic (as evident of Jordan’s mighty talent given that he wholly embodies two different people without overdoing it). That’s how big “Sinners” is – just one Michael B. Jordan won’t do, just as the movie itself feels like two movies in one, or three, or four, or five, even, a blockbuster of brains, brawn, and sheer watchable bliss. There is so much that there is almost, perhaps, too much, and yet, even if there was, by the end, I did not feel overstuffed, just pleasantly full.

Smoke and Stack have returned home to Clarksdale, Mississippi after getting rich up north as part of Al Capone’s Outfit. When asked why they would return to their native state, one twin replies, “Chicago ain’t shit but Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations.” It’s a profanely poetic and revealing line, suggesting the promised land of the Great Migration was anything but. And by returning home, they cease seeking that promise somewhere else and decide to instill it where they’re from. They purchase a sawmill from a one-time Klan member, taking something from the white devil to transform into a black utopia as juke joint with their gifted guitar-playing cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) as the feature attraction. When Stack first hears him launch into a song, the way Jordan whips his head around speaks for all of us, epitomizing how the sound of Sammie seems to fill the limitless Mississippi sky above them.

Clarksdale, Mississippi, of course, is the location of the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to learn to play the blues. It’s one of our most durable and sizable American legends, infused with racial coding, and has been interpreted and retold in myriad ways. And just as Coogler drew from the considerable mythology of the “Rocky” series to make “Creed,” a movie that felt alive and fresh but in conversation with its predecessors, so too does he draw from the mythology of the blues to tell his own story with “Sinners.” And he tells it by fusing the folklore of the American Delta with folklore culled from the Carpathian Mountains of Europe, in a sense crossing “Lightning in a Bottle” (2004) with “From Dusk Till Dawn” (1996), which sounds impossible, and which is why despite familiar elements, “Sinners” feels brand new.

Though the back half of “Sinners” is frenzied, Coogler takes his time with the wind-up, a joyful riff on putting a crew together, following Smoke and Stack as they split up to gather cohorts to put on their juke joint’s opening night: a sharecropper to watch the door, Chinese grocers to tend bar, and Smoke’s estranged wife Annie, a hoodoo healer. There are so many characters, in fact, that there are too many, preventing some from truly developing as real personalities, or seeing their stories through in a satisfactory way. Then again, that’s not necessarily what Coogler intends, seeing them less as individuals, almost, than as individual ingredients flavoring a giant stew. In other words, the chief goal is to imbue a sense of community, one connected by the music, specifically Sammie’s, building to a stunning moment in which Sammie’s guitar-playing and singing opens a literal portal on screen to the past and present and future. Like so much of “Sinners,” this sequence exhilarates; throughout it, I had this rolling wave of goosebumps. It’s a moment where I wanted to stop the projector and lead the whole crowd in a chant: Mo-vies! Mo-vies! Mo-vies!

This is the pivotal aesthetic sequence but the pivotal narrative sequence too. Crucially, Sammie has not sold anything to play the blues. His skills belong to him alone, but those skills are so formidable, they are what draw the devil to the doorstep of the juke joint, or at least, a form of the devil. That brings us back to Carpathian folklore and Remmick (Jack O’Connell), conspicuously not seen in our tale until the sun sets. He shows up at Smoke and Stack’s place with two other instrument-carrying white folks, Bert and Joan (Peter Dreimanis and Lola Kirke), a makeshift folk trio asking to be invited in. Coogler might be rendering the appropriation of the blues literal, but by making Remmick an Irish immigrant, the other target of the also anti-Catholic Klan, and by making Bert and Joan white extremists, he cuts even deeper. Their version of the old folk song Will Ye Go, Lassie Go? is not haunting; it’s haunted; it’s inviting them to an undead Eden of false inclusivity where, they’ll tell you, color and creed don’t exist. 

Indeed, while the back half of “Sinners” is essentially just another supernatural chamber piece, albeit one conveyed by Coogler with maximum force, it is complicated by that ostensible invitation, a group digging in their heels in a world, nay, a country that does not necessarily want them, determined to stay and fight. That’s a difficult idea to resolve, especially when there is also so much to narratively resolve too and probably explains why “Sinners” feels as if it has multiple endings. Coogler, though, sticks the landing by drawing from his own Marvel history, spiritually tying everything together with a mid-credits sequence that reminded me of Spike Lee’s conclusion to “Malcolm X” by bringing the past into the present, while also transforming a real-life bluesman into something like a superhero.