Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history. Here, when a Black musician plays the blues at a juke joint, he isn’t just performing for jubilant men and women. He is also singing to the history that flows through them from generations of ancestors to others not yet born. Like Coogler, the musician is a kind of time traveler, blasting off into horizonless possibilities.
Few American filmmakers in recent memory have risen with the dizzying speed of Coogler, who a decade ago vaulted to attention with “Creed,” his franchise rethink that took the “Rocky” series off life support. With his ensuing “Black Panther” superhero movies, Coogler rose higher still, proving that he could retain both a distinct aesthetic sensibility and a sense of human proportion (and stakes) even in the Marvel movie factory. His vision of Wakanda, the otherworldly country that the Black Panther calls home, works in part because of its far-out visions and technological wonders. Yet if it’s persuasive it’s because in Coogler’s Wakanda, you are also never far from the reality that’s roiling right outside the cinematic frame.
That reality is even more vividly present in the dusty roads and bustling vibrancy of “Sinners,” which takes place in 1932 in and around Clarksdale, Miss., a Delta town tucked in the northwest corner of the state. There, amid endless fields of cotton, Sammie (the appealing newcomer Miles Caton), a sweetly sincere son of a preacher man, yearns to play music. He gets a break when his cousins, the identical twins Smoke and Stack — both played with luminous feeling by Michael B. Jordan — transform a derelict building into a juke joint. There, Sammie all but burns the place down with his resonant voice and twangy dobro, a guitar with a provenance as devilish as that of the bluesman Robert Johnson.
Coogler, who also wrote the screenplay, gets his game on early in “Sinners,” which opens with a grabber of a scene and a dazed, bloodied Sammie bursting into his father’s church mid-sermon, a jaggedly broken-off guitar neck clutched in one hand. A few beats later and the story skips back to the recent past. Such temporal scrambling is overused; presumably because “Citizen Kane” continues to cast its shadow over film schools. But as intros go, this one is enough of a question mark to stir your curiosity, which only intensifies with the entrance of Smoke and Stack, syncopated dandies with high style and a heavy past, who’ve endured war, survived Al Capone’s Chicago and held fast to smoldering romances.
Smoke and Stack are two sides of the same charismatic coin; it’s hard not to see the filmmaker and his star in similar terms. The first time you see the twins they’re waiting on the building’s owner. Stack has on a sharp reddish fedora and tie, a handkerchief neatly tucked in a breast pocket. There’s a hint of gold in his ready smile, and more than a suggestion of malice. His brother is wearing a blue cap and soon dragging on a cigarette, tendrils of smoke wafting across his sterner, more melancholic face. The effect of these lookalikes is lightly destabilizing, and when Stack leans across to light Smoke’s cigarette, you may find yourself leaning toward the screen, mesmerized by the synchronicity of bodies and digital wizardry.
Once the twins seal the deal, the other narrative pieces begin falling in place. There are many, some of which fit together better than others. Delroy Lindo shows up as another bluesman, Delta Slim, as do Li Jun Li and Yao as the grocer wife and husband, Grace and Bo Chow. Each brother reconnects with an old lover — Smoke with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Stack with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) — mirrored romances that never line up as neatly as Coogler seems to intend. Annie breaks your heart; Mary works your nerves. That would be less of a problem if Mary, a woman with a fraught identity, wasn’t burdened with so much symbolism. Mosaku, by contrast, is playing a flesh-and-blood woman, not a conceit, and her reunion with Jordan’s Smoke is so beautifully felt (and smokin’ hot) it deepens the emotional texture.
“Sinners” is the fifth feature that Coogler has directed; on occasion, it can feel like his fifth, sixth and seventh all rolled into one. There’s pleasure in much of this excess, in seeing how Coogler takes his imaginative detours and the fluidity with which he draws from past, present, myth and speculative fiction, including in a masterpiece of a sequence in which men and women from across history — traditional dancers and B-boys among others — converge at the juke joint. There’s great horror in this world, in the fields haunted by slavers and in a mean little house where a Klansman’s white hood and robes sit on a bed belonging to a mean little man. Yet the joy here is louder, and it resounds in every whoop and thundering stomp.
It’s at that same shack that a devil comes calling in the form of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a smooth-talking Irish charmer who helps take the movie in a more familiar direction, as romance gives way to escalating violence. Remmick is a seductive villain but he and the trouble that he brings with him at times overwhelm the latter part of the movie, much of which takes place inside the juke joint, turning a space of liberation and pleasure into a veritable war zone. Coogler’s work remains effortless, with staging and shooting that are so tightly synchronized that everything else, love included, seems to melt away. You can scarcely catch your breath as demons and humans clash, as some souls are lost and others found.
Coogler is a superb action director, which is perhaps why he lavishes so much time on this battle royale, with its gunfire and sanguineous fountains. Even so, the scenes that keep replaying in my head are the quieter, subtler ones, including a sequence in which the camera tracks Grace’s daughter (Helena Hu) from one grocery store in town to another one across the street, where her movements are mirrored (twinned, you could say) by Grace, who crosses the street back to the first grocery as if closing a circle. By the end of “Sinners,” Grace and many others will have gone through hell. But I like to think that her daughter will still be there, walking in the sun as Sammie’s songs play on, becoming the soundtrack for all the generations of real fighters and survivors who are, I think, finally this movie’s great subject.
Sinners
Rated R for gun, wooden stake and fang violence. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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