Sinners

Who are the sinners in the title of Ryan Coogler’s astonishing new film? Early scenes offer us a few good suspects. There’s the local white grandee, Hogwood, a jovial, jowly menace who agrees to sell his mill to Elijah and Elias Moore, local Black twins better known as Smoke and Stack. The film takes place over a single day in October of 1932, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and most of its characters are impoverished Black sharecroppers still living on plantations. So it’s tempting to see Hogwood, in a tan Stetson hat and a wolfish grin, as the embodiment of America’s cardinal sin, racism. But Hogwood conducts his transaction without too much trouble and departs, leaving the twins in possession of a fine piece of property.

Smoke and Stack, both played by the sublime Michael B. Jordan, are no slouches either when it comes to sinning: Having fought in World War I, they spent a few years in Chicago, doing brisk and bloody business with Al Capone. Now they’ve returned to their hometown heavy with cash and ambition to open a nightclub where their friends could drink, gamble, fornicate and, most importantly, listen to great music.

That’s where another would-be sinner comes in, the twins’ cousin, Sammie, played by the excellent newcomer Miles Caton. His father is the local pastor, so everyone calls Sammie “Preacher Boy” and expects him to follow the family vocation. But Sammie is an exceptionally good guitar player, the sort of musician, an eerie voiceover informs us over the film’s opening credits, who can not only pierce the veil between past, present, and future but also, if he’s not careful, attract the attention of some truly unsavory forces. “You keep dealing with the Devil,” Sammie’s father tells him as he implores him to stay in church rather than go play music at the twins’ makeshift joint, “one day he’s gonna follow you home.”

And follow, of course, he does. Or, rather, they do: No sooner do the twins and their coterie of friends begin the festivities than a knock comes on the club’s door. Outside are Remmick, Burt, and Joan, three very lovely white folks with big, ingratiating smiles. They’re not segregationists like those other bigoted boobs in town, they tell the suspicious twins as they plea for an invitation to join the party; they believe in equality, and music. To prove it, they pull out their banjos and sing a wholesome tune, looking and sounding beatific in the pale moonlight.

The charming white folk are entirely sincere in their good intentions and in their frequent evocations of peace, love, and kindness. Also, they’re vampires.

Immediately, we’re tempted to see the trio of bloodsuckers as metaphors. Clarksdale, as any music lover would tell you, is where Robert Johnson allegedly ambled over to the intersection of Highways 49 and 61 at midnight, handing his soul to the Devil in exchange for becoming the greatest bluesman alive. And the vampires show up at the end of a scene in which Sammie’s music, as promised, literally collapses time on itself, summoning to the dance floor—in a dizzying tracking shot that is one of the most precious sights cinema has conjured in many years—African tribal dancers and funk guitarists in yellow spandex, ancient masked shamans and hip-hop DJs, showing us that the beat, quite literally, always goes on. Did the white devils arrive only to steal the Black man’s music?

Ask any self-appointed American intellectual these days, and the answer would be as predictable as it is tedious. But Coogler is something much greater than a peddler of bargain basement identity politics; like all major artists, he understands that humanity transcends the piteous power structures devised by mirthless academics and mercenary operatives. “When people think about the 1930s Mississippi,” he recently told Variety, “the first thing that comes to mind is segregation. Hard times. You don’t think about people dealing with all that actually having a good time, like having a party so good you wish you could go to it. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we might have a movie here.’ And not just a movie, but a movie for our time now.”

And being a movie for our time now, Sinners soon has the vampire family growing, Blacks and whites making music together, the very image of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Sure, they bite, but once you get used to your altered state, you’re guaranteed an eternity of taking comfort in your platitudes and attitudes. It may sound flat, facile, and soulless, but it’s a mighty tempting alternative to reality, where hardships are guaranteed but survival isn’t.

But giving up on life’s beautiful struggle is not only the biggest sin imaginable—it may be the only one. Weaving together operatic set pieces with suffocatingly intimate scenes, Coogler pierces through the sound and the fury of the vampire genre to deliver a deeply personal and emotional drama about men who must learn to trust not only each other but also the women who love them, about children yearning to break free from the shadow of hulking fathers, about imperfect people negotiating imperfect societies with subtlety and grace. He also, however, delivers a political allegory for the ages, one that torches—again, quite literally—the progressive pieties that too often pass for truth and profundity in American culture.

“Everybody has asked the question, what should we do with the Negro?” Frederick Douglass thundered in a speech in 1865. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall. … And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!”

Smoke and Stack couldn’t have said it better themselves. And, like too many Black Americans, they learn the hard way just what happens when the do-gooders, unchecked and unopposed, are allowed to do what they believe is good. We, sadly, have seen this grim scenario play out in reality, more disturbing than anything a scary movie could ever evoke. We know, for example, that while the United States in 1932 was hardly heaven for its Black citizens, two out of three Black children nationwide back then were living in households with both of their parents. Today, nearly a century of aggressive progressive legislation later, the number has plummeted to about a quarter. We also know that every census from 1890 to 1940 marked the marriage rate among Blacks as significantly higher than among whites; by 2021, only 31.2 percent of the Black population was married, compared with 53.9 percent of whites.

The Black family wasn’t decimated by the Hogwoods of this world, rank racists determined to preserve their systems of oppression. It was annihilated by rejecting Frederick Douglass’ wise counsel and replacing pride, particularism, and the joys of tribal loyalties with the gauzy promise of universal, cosmopolitan liberalism and its miracle cures, which have turned out to be poison. It’s not for nothing that the moral backbone of Coogler’s film is Smoke’s wife, Annie, a healer who still remembers how to brew the old world’s traditional remedies out of roots and leaves. She’s the first one to understand that there’s nothing more deadly to the soul than allowing yourself to be bitten by those who want us all to become one indistinguishable horde, all thinking and acting and sounding alike.

This may be why Coogler chose the vampire genre as his vehicle to tell this story. Vampires, as any horror fan could tell you, can’t just walk into your house; they have to be invited in, and much of the fun in Sinners involves the ghouls thinking up clever ways to convince the humans inside the club to have some heart and open wide the door. The message couldn’t be clearer: If you don’t give in to their bullshit, they can’t hurt you, at which point all you have to do is know that dawn will soon come again, destroying the foul creatures once and for all.

Which makes Sinners, alas, required viewing for American Jews. We, too, have fought for the privilege of standing on our own legs, only to sit right back down, invite the vampires in, and let them suck the spirit out of us and replace it with a smile and some platitudes about tikkun olam. And now, as it was for Smoke and Stack and everyone else holed up in the mill with guns and torches and wooden stakes, hoping to make it through the night, it’s time for us, too, to fight back.