Oakland native Ryan Coogler’s fifth feature, “Sinners,” is his best yet, a daring epic that challenges the very notion of genre filmmaking and adds new blood to the movie landscape in the process.
“Sinners” resembles a hearty Southern gumbo spiced up with ideas about Black America, the blues, faith, the supernatural, and cultural appropriation.
But above all else, Coogler’s film is big, unpredictable and massively entertaining, a worthy new chapter in an already impressive catalogue.
“Sinners” hurdles audiences to 1932 Jim Crow-era Clarksdale, Mississippi, for 24 hours. (It’s the same timeframe as Coogler used in his debut feature “Fruitvale Station”). The era is brought to evocative life via Oscar winner Ruth E. Carter’s dapper and sexy costumes and Hannah Bleacher’s intricate production design that seems lifted from a history book. But it is Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography (the film was shot on IMAX cameras) that burnishes images into our senses. It’s stunning.
“Sinners” presents us with not one but two of Michael B. Jordan’s most memorable performances, a common theme shared in the Jordan-Coogler collaboration canon. The charismatic star, with the best biceps in the business, has a grand time playing twins Smoke and Stack. Both are flashy World War I vets who have booked it from Chicago after doing jobs for Al Capone. They’re back on their home turf where they scurry about to put on one hell of a show at a hastily created juke joint.
While trying to make that happen on property with KKK ties, they run smack into strong women from their pasts. The hard-to-pin-down Stack tangles with boiling-mad ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) who demands answers about why she was jilted. Smoke reconnects, in one of the film’s most lusty moments (there are quite a few), with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), an old flame who’s also a Hoodoo conjurer. Their chemistry is hot.
In between that, the twins recruit hard-drinkin’ blues man Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, plucking all the right notes) to perform at the juke joint. The big head-turning discovery, though, comes in the form of their magnetic 19-year-old cousin Sammie – aka Preacher Boy.
Portrayed with showstopping charisma and an impressive set of pipes by newcomer Miles Caton, Sammie is the son of a preacher who sees the blues as a one-way ticket to damnation. Regardless, Sammie blows Stack away with his soulful voice and expert guitar playing skills. That dawn of discovery is an incredible moment that plays out in a car with Jordan’s reaction to Sammie’s star-making talent being dead-on perfect.
Coinciding with Smoke and Stack’s preparations for this big to-do are the devious activities of Remmick (Jack O’Connell getting his freaky creep on very well) whose legacy extends way back in time. He assembles some disciples hellbent on becoming the ultimate juke joint party crashers.
Coogler’s film is deliciously sexual, suspenseful, creepy and funny — and pays homage to horror classics. Some of its best moments center on those invigorating music and dance sequences at the juke joint. They overflow with robust contagious energy, ebullience and Black Pride that it makes you long to be there with them. Helping to create that mood is the wide-ranging score from Ludwig Göransson, who has partnered with Coogler on many projects.
“Sinners” doesn’t scrimp when it comes to the bloodletting, but it mostly has some serious ambitions as well as offering audiences a shot of crowd-cheering redemption: a little payback to the racists of yesteryear and today.
It also is storytelling that’s multi-layered, exciting and metaphoric and illustrates how Coogler is one of our boldest visionaries.. One sequence finds Remmick’s crew craving to be invited into the juke joint and it can’t help but remind you of how Black artists often didn’t get invited into music studio doors when their songs got appropriated by white performers and rocketed up the charts.
The fertile territory maneuvers Coogler into more narratively exciting and daring directions. He’s more than up for the task. Since it was shot in IMAX cameras, “Sinners” demands being experienced in a movie theater. But whatever you do, stay put in your seats till the very end. There’s something special Coogler cooks up in an extended finale scene and it would be a sin to sin to miss it.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
‘SINNERS’
4 stars out of 4
Rating: R (sex, violence, language)
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Wnumi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell
Director/writer: Ryan Coogler
Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes
Where: Opens April 18 in theaters