The other week, at the former SAG Awards (I’m just not ready to call them by that new name: the Actors, ay-yi-yi), Michael B. Jordan was in the middle of greeting his new best actor statue when an expression came over him that I’d never seen him make.
He was thanking his “Sinners” cast mates by name, while his Actor statue gazed up at him from a table, and suddenly it seemed to occur to him that this accolade really was his. His gaze was downward, his eyes ever so widened, his mouth forming the “o” of “Omar,” as in Omar Miller, who plays the movie’s sharecropping doorman, when Jordan’s hands went up to his temples, as if to keep his head from exploding. He was dumbfounded. That was the new expression.
It must have been fresh to other people, too, because the internet selected this moment as the thumbnail meme of his win. It captures him at the peculiar junction where the human experience overlaps with a nominees’s: acceptance, of oneself, of validating hardware, of oneself via hardware. Michael B. Jordan had won. Not for something cutely specific like “best action sequence” or arguably rigged like “sexiest man alive.” He’d won for his ability to bring a character to life, for acting. And because he plays twin gangsters in “Sinners,” the win was for bringing two characters to life. His fellow actors had voted him the best. Michael B. Jordan! He couldn’t believe it. (Timothée Chalamet’s been the year’s prize magnet.) Watching it live, neither could his fellow nominees, neither could any other actor in the room. Neither could I. Speaking for us all, it was the happiest kind of wild.
And now we’re a day away from the Academy Awards, and Jordan’s upset has gone and goosed the odds for his being dumbfounded all over again. The suspense is terrible, even for me. And all I’m doing on Sunday is sitting on a sofa. But that I think speaks to the curious thing about movie stardom in general and about this particular movie star. He’s won my heart yet not my figurative best actor ballot. I’m in the tank for Wagner Moura, the long fuse snaking and sneaking its way through “The Secret Agent.”
So what is it that I couldn’t believe about Jordan winning that award? He had just never done it for me. Like Brad Pitt for a long time, Jordan can seem remote in repose. Or as if his performances are happening so fast, so desperately, that I’m usually left to wonder what the rush is. That was an early Harrison Ford problem. Jordan often seems like he’s playing blood pressure as an emotion. That can work for high-stress scenarios like his climactic face-off with Chadwick Boseman near the end of “Black Panther.” Yet that encounter is as much ideological as it is physical, and Jordan’s line readings tend to conjure the pages bearing those lines. Boseman conjures podiums and proscenium arches. Fights about Jordan’s acting have lit up chat rooms and nearly destroyed barbershops. Is he good? We’re just. Not. Sure.
I HAD WATCHED “Sinners” three times yet had never truly seen what it is that Jordan’s doing in the movie. When I sat for a fourth helping after the award ceremony, I paid strict attention only to him. Did I miss something? What’d his fellow actors see that I couldn’t?
Well, first he was perhaps upstaged by the ambitions of the movie itself. Then there’s the matter of everybody else in the movie. Two of the performances speak for themselves. Wunmi Mosaku, who plays the conjurewoman, Annie, is working with deep reserves of solemnity and warmth (even her death scene has a kind of principled sensuousness). Delroy Lindo, who plays the musician Delta Slim, manages to be drunk, deep and ridiculous, usually in the same scene. (They’re both up for supporting Oscars.) Then there’s the discovery of Miles Caton, as Sammie, the guitar-playing blues prodigy, who, like Jordan, has in absorbing presence what he lacks in capital-A acting. Unlike Jordan, who’s 39, Caton’s brand-new.
But when you watch “Sinners” only for Jordan, the movie somehow deepens further. The frequency he’d been on in previous roles often seemed resolutely masculine, shelled, concealing: Leading Man TM. But he’s a new actor here. Right there in Jordan’s introductory shot, as the camera swings around him to reveal that he’s been doubled into identical twins (Smoke and Stack), there’s more going on than swagger. Smoke (signature color: blue) is leaning over for his brother Stack (in the scarlet hat and tie) to light his cigarette. They pass the cigarette between each other. This is an effects department showing off. But we’re also talking about an instant emission of tender connection.
It’s 1932 and everybody in town knows these men are trouble, as a tandem or on their own. Stack is swaggier, more brazen. Jordan doesn’t let that twin’s mouth exactly close, lest you miss all the gold inside. He’s the hide your daughters sort of trouble, a showman, a court-holder, a pot-stirrer. Smoke doesn’t do a lot of comedy; he’s ’bout his business. Don’t play: He will shoot you. Jordan understands how to operate the valves of their bond. He makes one the other’s keeper, even once the movie’s vampires turn them into adversaries.
Jordan’s eyes don’t often give you much — there’s no narrowing or dilating. They’re like Stack’s mouth sometimes: a vault. That mouth, though, is the key to Jordan. That’s got settings. When Annie feels Smoke up at her store, Jordan all but quivers his lower lip, comes yea-close to releasing one of those erogenous “f” words but takes a soft bite of himself instead. Gentleness is his best mode, and Ryan Coogler, the writer and director, understands this; he’s made all five of his films with Jordan. And in most, it’s the moment his guard goes down, often with a woman, that makes you sit up and lean forward.
“Sinners” gives Jordan a few of these easings of the drawbridge. He’s playing two tough guys, but one of them is still grieving his dead son. Before he and Annie make love, Smoke tries dismissing her root work. She asks him how he knows that the same mojo didn’t keep him and his brother from getting dead up in Chicago. And suddenly, Jordan goes soft, boyish, hurt, ashamed, ever so bereft before delivering perhaps the best line reading of his whole acting life: “So why those roots ain’t work on our baby?” Why did I need four trips to Annie’s shop to feel as torn up as Jordan makes this man? The only excuse I can offer is there was just too much else going on in this movie to appreciate Jordan’s delicacy.
That old Negro saw about Black people needing to be twice as good as everybody else is a joke you could make about Jordan having to play twins to beat four white men at the SAGs. But taking on two roles also animates the more existential Negro concept of double consciousness, that African Americans possess a pair of warring souls, one Black, the other American. That’s an idea made to hurt in the final stages of “Sinners,” a stretch in which Stack is made a vampire and therefore an undead recruit in a white man’s grungy army. He and Smoke tussle, one brother hoping to convert the other to the dark side, less for the evil than the eternal conjoining. And as they fight each other, their Black music oasis, this little American dream, goes up in flames around them.
WE ROOT FOR JORDAN as though he’s the best team never to enter the postseason. Now he’s here, in the finals, and there’s real excitement that he could go all the way. There’s been a meaningful gap between our passion for him as a man (the earnest goodness he radiates, the uproarious randiness he induces) and our belief in his acting. Thus, the euphoric shock at the SAG Awards.
This brings me to the other instantaneously memorable image from Jordan’s win. It was of Viola Davis, after she opens the envelope, sees Jordan’s name and proceeds to bellow it with all the frank force, emotional power and electric shock of a revelation, of a dream come true. She felt free to love what she saw on that card, to prefer this outcome. Davis’s disbelief in that moment was also her belief. In him. Why didn’t that feel like way too much? Would you look at the world?
For an answer, I’d return to that fight in “Black Panther,” in which Boseman’s character triumphs over Jordan’s. Jordan is supposed to be that movie’s bad guy. And it feels terrible to see him lose. It hurts, almost, because of those intangibles that make a star a star. Jordan’s got ’em. However flat or too fast or too locked inside himself he can seem, you love him, his cool, his warmth.
Yes, that’s it: You love the innocence in his face, its innocent roundness, the goodness of character that shoots right out of his rich brown eyes. It’s not his acting that we keep showing up to see and rooting for. It’s not his chops. It’s what we need to feel everywhere, all the time, especially now. It’s heart. And Michael B. Jordan is all heart.
Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.
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