What a blood rush to exit Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” aware that you’ve seen not merely a great movie but an eternal movie, one that will transcend today’s box office and tomorrow’s awards to live on as a forever favorite. If the cinema had a dozen more ambitious populists like Coogler, it would be in tip-top health. The young filmmaker who started his career with the 2013 Sundance indie “Fruitvale Station” had to make three franchise hits — one “Rocky” and two “Black Panthers” — before getting the green-light to direct his own original spectacle. It was worth the wait. Let the next Coogler get there faster.
“Sinners” is set in 1932 Mississippi where a preacher’s teenage son, Sammie (Miles Caton), is risking his soul to sing with a guitar. His dad (Saul Williams) deems it a sin. “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s going to follow you home,” his father cautions a few minutes into the film. From the opening scene, a flash-forward to Sammie stumbling into church, bloody and half-catatonic, we already know he’s right.
Danger hangs in the air like the clouds over the fields where Sammie works barefoot, mud squelched between his toes. But from where? There’s dread in the hoodoo mysticism that blues voices like Sammie’s have — voices with the power, like Orpheus, to unite the living and the dead. And there’s plain and violent corruption embodied by Sammie’s gangster cousins, twins Smoke and Stack (both played, muscularly, by Michael B. Jordan), who have slithered back into town after seven years away in Chicago killing for Al Capone. The twins have a truck of liquor and plans to open their own juke joint that night. Sammie can’t wait to perform there.
Oh, and there’s also a slick-talking vampire named Remmick (a slippery Jack O’Connell) whose bites transform his victims into a finger-plucking folk band, snapping the necks of their instruments back and forth like a vaudeville act.
Coogler has orchestrated three clashing genres — drama, musical and monster movie — into a hymnal about the struggle to create something beautiful during your time on Earth. A party, a song, an everlasting commune, each major character in the movie is chasing down some kind of dream, the same essential proof that they lived. Ludwig Göransson’s phenomenal score backs Coogler up, layering fiddles over doom metal as if they were meant to harmonize. This is music you’ve never heard and yet it seems to come from deep inside our pop-cultural soul, a symphony of violence for a country that looks at a violin case and imagines a Tommy gun.
Structurally, the vampires don’t appear until the second half, which gives us plenty of time to get into rhythm with our human characters. Jordan’s Smoke and Stack are identical down to the mustache and in alignment on nearly everything. We’re left to tease out their differences. Smoke is quieter, watchful and more dangerous. He can (and does) shoot a friend in the keister without hesitation and then peels off a $20 for his medical bills. Stack is flashier: gold tooth, freewheeling energy. My only quibble is the costume team’s decision to accessorize Smoke in blue and Stack in flame red. It’s hard enough telling them apart without having to rewire your brain that the Jordan not named after a fire is the Jordan dressed like one.
The film has grown-up sex appeal. Both twins have women, estranged ones at least: Smoke was once with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a witchy botanical healer, while Stack had a youthful dalliance with nervy, white-presenting Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), whose mother took in the boys when their father died. As for innocent Sammie, played with strong presence by first-time actor Caton (a gospel singer who started performing as a toddler), he’s pining for Pearline (Jayme Lawson), an impetuous married woman who ditches her husband for the club’s opening blowout and rattles the walls belting a bouncy foot-stomper.
By that time, the juke joint has also picked up four more employees: a drunken pianist nicknamed Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a field hand-slash-bouncer called Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) and Bo and Grace Chao (Yao and Li Jun Li), a married couple who run the town’s grocery stores. Manipulating all these people to do their bidding, the charming if morally iffy twins are talented at turning a no into a yes. When Slim is reluctant to skip his steady gig for these sharks, Stack almost magically gifts him a bootlegged Irish beer from Chicago. The boozer takes a swig. “Act now and I’ll even let you finish that bottle in your hand,” Stack says with a grin. He’d slay on infomercials.
Coogler’s script delivers everything it promises with a grisly flourish. Early on, the twins tell Sammie he can drive their red car home in the morning — and again, from that very first intro shot, we know that will happen but without the twins in it. If one character threatens to shoot another where they stand, that’ll come true, and if Smoke warns a girl to look out for thieves, then they must be just around the corner. From bullet sprays to sweaty Klansmen to buzzards circling overhead, “Sinners” doesn’t hold back like it’s too sophisticated to give the audience what they want. The sophistication is there in its style and confidence, in how it lays out this story with the clean, cruel menace of a poker dealer who has planned out exactly how the house will win.
This frankness means I’m inclined to believe Remmick and his burgeoning cult of bloodsuckers when they swear that the afterlife is the only place where our protagonists can truly be free. Immortality offers a liberation that the Jim Crow-era South doesn’t, both for the Black characters and even the white ones, whose bigoted special status winds up narrowing their options. Racism plays out here in encounters that we haven’t seen a thousand times, like when the brothers refuse to allow a handful of white musicians inside the club — a justified paranoia of what could happen if a Black patron scuffed one of their shoes.
And while moviegoers have seen plenty of vampire scenes, the ones here cut to the chase so fast that I’m of two minds about how they play out. Annie, our paranormal expert, is instantly aware of what they are and how to fight them. (She puts the survivors through a tense garlic-eating test that is Coogler’s fanboy karaoke of John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”) The climactic battle feels hasty in the moment, but dragging it out any longer — or worse, having to make everyone recite the usual vampire-killing rules — would have been duller than elevator music.
What’s more interesting is the question these vampires stir up: Why would any of their prey fight to stay in this harsh and unjust world? The twins are living on borrowed time. They’ve narrowly escaped family abuse and the German trenches of the Great War. Now the mafia is after them too. They have a choice: a short life or an eternal one.
There’s not much hemming and hawing over the dilemma. Coogler keeps things at a clip. He’s set out to make an adventure that’s equal parts smart and fun, and when forced to prioritize, fun wins. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d pruned his script of every line too thematically on the nose. (Almost.) He wants the audience free to be moved by whichever emotion personally resonates with them — desire, fear, pleasure, disgust — and in that way, “Sinners” works more like a pop song than a grand statement, the kind of deceptively simple high-level craft that few people can pull off.
Bloodshed — waves of it — comes in crescendos. The scares are clever, particularly a teasing, agonizing bit where one locked-away killer punctures a door with a knife and characters who should know better keep peeping through the hole until we’re itching to shout that their eyes are in stabbing range. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw shoots on film for Imax and every one of her frames is sharp and precise.
Yet as good as the fights are, you leave talking about the music. Yes, Sammie’s songs will summon evil — and do. But music saves people too. You hear that theme in how singing makes the time pass for the workers in the cotton rows, and in the scene when Slim tells a story about a friend who got lynched and the man’s screams echo into the present until Slim hums and drums his fingertips to overwhelm the sound of all that pain.
Music boasts a lifespan that eclipses any vampire; it’s the heartbeat of humanity that goes back to our very first campground circles. To prove it, Coogler’s centerpiece is a giant, time-bending number where the past and present take over the dance floor: b-boys, beaded tribesmen, twerkers, clones of Misty Copeland and Bootsy Collins, ancient peoples in African masks. The camera takes in the whole party and then it tilts upward: The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Let this rager burn.