Sinners
Synopsis: Brothers in the 1930’s Deep South of America open up a Blues club. Things get scary.
It wasn’t enough that director Ryan Coogler cast Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station (2013), launching his movie star rising. MBJ went on to win mass appeal in the Coogler-helmed Creed (2015) and Black Panther (2018). Now the director has hired two Michael B. Jordans for Sinners. Let me explain…
MBJ is times two as identical twin brothers Elijah/Smoke and Elias/Stack Moore. I wished that one brother had long hair or some distinctive feature like a facial scar. Instead, we get sartorial differences: Smoke wears blue and Stack wears red. And Smoke favors cabbie caps while Stack wears an upsized fedora. Still, one of the guys could’ve worn a tie with his name on it because I’m sure that the characters in the story would get confused too, leading to all sorts of misunderstandings. Alas, the film is a drama not a comedy.
The year is 1932 and the men have traveled back home from Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi. They return with a bundle of cash and a truckload of booze. The rumors are that the brothers worked for gangsters or maybe stole from them. Still, the Deep South is a dangerous place for Black people, especially two proud and ambitious Black men. Their plan is thusly…
Smoke and Stack want to open a blues club. They’ve paid a creepy white guy for an old mill. The guy is a white supremacist and can barely speak civilly to the twins. As he leaves they tell him that if he and his Klan cronies come back and cause any trouble, they’ll shoot them. Shoot them dead.
Next, they meet up with their young cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), a blues prodigy, at his preacher dad’s humble church. The preacher doesn’t like the twins because he sees them as devoted to vice, not God. As you can imagine, for Sammie, the lure of chilling with his worldly older cousins is strong. Stronger than sweeping up his dad’s church and listening to his sermons. Nonetheless, he’s called Preacher Boy. A pretty good name for a blues guitarist, I think.
Smoke and Stack drive Sammie into town where they set to hiring musicians and staff. The men are greeted like celebrities; celebrities you might be leery of, like the kind on those pawn broker reality shows. After securing supplies from shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao), the brothers approach Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) who’s playing harmonica by a storefront. He hesitates to work for Smoke & Stack because he already has a regular gig. Delta is an alcoholic. The brothers are wise to this. When they add Irish beer to their cash offer, he accepts.
I figured that Sinners would be all about the men getting the club up and running, with a dramatic finish on opening night. Nope. The brothers plan on having the club up and running within 24 hours: This is craziness! Maybe they can get the musicians playing on short notice and the liquor moved into the club, but how will they get customers into the place? These are the dark days before social media could almost instantaneously draw a crowd. Then again, the area seems pretty dull, so if word spreads quickly, everyone in the Black community will want to be there. Except Preacher Boy’s dad, that is.
When Smoke and Stack left behind their Klan-riven southern back water, where sharecropping cotton is one of the few ways to get by, they left behind kin and kith. The men’s most significant kith are their former significant others. I was glad to meet them because you can only watch so much of the nuts and bolts of setting up a business enterprise, even if the place is a juke joint that promises a banging night out.
Smoke’s ex is Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo lady who lives outside of town. Annie has knowledge of West African juju practices. When Smoke & Stack were soldiers (in WWI, I guess), Annie gave Smoke a mojo to protect him. Ha! says Smoke because his horrific war experiences have brought him to a nihilistic mind space. Well, says Annie, you did survive. They agree to disagree. Smoke asks her to be the cook at the club, where anywhere from one person to a few hundred people could show up.
The one person who will def be at the new club is Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s ex. She’s back in town for a funeral. Seems that Stack ghosted her. She seems hungry for some vengeance and maybe some ex sex. Mary is mixed race/white passing.
Somehow the club, SmokeStack, opens that night. Moore Bros. would’ve been fly too. Delta sets the tone, before playing at the piano, telling the brothers that Blues music is magic from Africa. Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a velvety-voiced singer, captivates the building crowd. Patrons loosen up and buy drinks.
Sammie burns down the house with a radical blues number. Things get supernatural when dancing ancestors appear, moving in and out of the throng. And someone is listening outside. Or something…
Approaching the club are a group of three whites, two men and a woman, cloaked in the darkness. They come to the door but are denied entry. The seeming leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), says they just heard the music and want to come in. The brothers are suspicious. Remmick sings to show that he’s just a harmless music lover. But there did seem to be a bit of froth on his woman companion’s mouth. And was the flash of red in one of the men’s eyes, a trick of the moonlight?
Before the sun rises, our core group will be subjected to taunting Irish dancing and bloody-fanged evil doers. In between peering out of the windows in horror, they feverishly sharpen wooden stakes and bring out a box of garlic from the kitchen, with Annie swiftly concocting jars of garlic juice. Our protagonists have survived the KKK and maybe even a haint* or two, but these things seem to have a pact with the devil.
So yeah, what I thought was about some Black folks enjoying a night of blues music becomes a full-on horror flick.
This all goes to show that Preacher Boy should’ve stayed in the vicinity of the church, tidying things up and saying prayers, just like Preacher Man said. Also…
When awards season rolls around, I expect to see acting awards for Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan.
* a haint is an evil spirit, according to Gulla Geechee southern lore. They can be repelled with sage, salt, blue paint (they think it’s water they could drown in). Or even distracted by newspapers pasted to the wall.
P.S. Expect & enjoy a performance from Blues legend, Buddy Guy.
P.P.S. The story is set in Mississippi but was filmed in Louisiana.
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