from the series Movie Corner…

5/5 Stars

Comedy/Dark Comedy

By HOWARD MCQUITTER II

All throughout, a profound maestro of blues with a quick glimpse of future Black music, rings strong from beginning to end. At the opening scene of director Ryan Coogler’s brilliant film (if not an outright masterwork) a young man, Sammie, drives up to a plain looking church, gets out and enters the place where the pastor, his father), is giving a Sunday sermon. When he approaches the pulpit where his father greets him, the camera zeros in on a snapped-off guitar neck in his right hand. Sammie’s face is bloodied and slashed as if he’s been in a brawl. That scene alone embodies a series of metaphors and allegories that will stare audiences in the face. His father requests Sammie to drop the guitar because “If you keep dancing with the Devil, one day he will follow you home.”

In a small town near Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, at the height of the Depression, identical twin brothers Stack and Smoke come back to their hometown from Chicago where they may have hooked up with Al Capone. Both men fought in the First World War before they galloped off to Chicago. Stack and Smoke come back with pockets full of money, unlike their former neighbors, many of whom are sharecroppers. But the twins have a plan for what they are going to do with their money. The men buy an abandoned mill from an intimidating middle-aged white man named Hogwood, a suspected Ku Klux Klan member, and make it into a juke joint that very night.

Smoke’s other reason for coming back to the Mississippi Delta is to see his love interest Annie, a local root woman who practices Hoodoo. But before he sees her, Stack and Sammie run into an elderly Black music legend Delta Slim who plays the harmonica for money at the train station. When Stack and Sammie turn around they see Mary, Stack’s old flame. She just recently came from her mother’s funeral. Mary is very fair-skinned and can pass for white. Someone mistaking her for white can be a problem if she’s talking to a Black man in Jim Crow Mississippi (and throughout the South, and even the North). Coogler puts two Chinese characters in Sinners, Grace and Bo as grocery store owners. This was a true reading of the time as a small group of Chinese did live in Mississippi. There are one or two scenes of Choctaw Indians in the film who were also living in Mississippi at the time.

That night, after the juke joint is up and running, the blues are flowing like whiskey as Black folks are enjoying themselves immensely, dancing, eating and drinking. A sharecropper, Cornbread, is told to watch the door. The blues fills every Black soul in the place. The sounds of Sammie with his guitar, Delta Slim on piano, and a Bessie Smith-like singer fire up as a fast-forward glimpse of future Black music such as jazz, rock’ roll, R&B, funk to hip-hop appear. Coogler is saying indirectly that Black people are the true blues people. Soon after the party is nearly in a frenzy, an Irishman named Remmick, a musician himself, accompanied by other whites, wants to enter the juke joint. They in a “nice” way plead with the doormen to let them in. Of course there is great reluctance to let them enter. Mary has already entered to see Stack. However, things start to go downhill rapidly. They are vampires coming to take over the music by any way necessary. What the vampires represent is the dominant society, then and now, attempting to steal the music from the blues people. The vampires go on a rampage (having Black allies who left the juke joint earlier and were bitten by the vampires). To say the least, Coogler’s film is original, not a sequel, reboot, or a remake.

Howard McQuitter II is a longtime movie critic. He has been reviewing movies for the alley since 2002.

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