Sinners

By Joanna Langfield

Ryan Coogler’s transcendent vampire movie is a veritable feast. Rich and ambitious, this is gorgeously made film that is hard to shake.

The always impressive Michael B. Jordan plays brothers, Smoke and Stack, back from a post WWI stint working the Chicago crime scene. Picking up their cousin Sammie, (Miles Caton, in an auspicious debut) they open a blues club, right in the Mississippi hometown that has, for various reasons, not forgotten them.

Once again, Coogler uses genre as a place to start what feels he is more interested in. Sure, the vampires that will sell this thing are an important part of the story, but I found what surrounds them, the atmospheric period locales, the exploration of the blues and what music can do, much more exciting. Yes, we’ve seen films that play with similar themes before, but there is something so deep, so essential in the way Coogler focuses us on them, they feel revelatory.

There’s fine supporting work from Jack O’Connell, Hailee Steinfeld and Wunmi Mosaku, but the performance that stands out is from the great Delroy Lindo, who makes a somewhat standard musician truly sing.

And speaking of music, oh my lord, the music. Coogler allows this distinctively American, born from the African-American musicians of the Deep South, musical form to have the day it more than deserves. Each piece, throughout, is offered, not as a passionless educational lesson, but as a glorious piece of art, one more of us should know and be proud of.

While there are several notable scenes throughout this entertainment with a soul, one, in particular, literally left me stunned. It’s Sammie’s musical debut, giving the club’s crowd life. Coogler’s camera swirls through them, eventually revealing artists from other generations, other genres. Music, like the moments of great artistry here, can lift us, carry us through the hardest of times. What a joy that is to behold.