Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to

Sinners weaves music and mystery so well I even put up with the vampires

[By the time you see this, the Academy Award nominations will have been announced — and like every year I’m reviewing the favorites in the big categories up through Oscar night. So far I’ve done Marty Supreme, Nuremberg, Frankenstein, Blue Moon, Wake Up Dead Man, Avatar: Fire and Ash and One Battle After Another. Follow along with me — movies are magic!)

Boy, I hate to draw parallels between politics and art — the latter is surely of vastly superior importance to humanity. But I gotta say, just as I’m happy to see smooth leftist politicians excite normies with what most dullards consider radical ideas, I’m also glad whenever I see a big-money movie go bold and even in some ways bughouse. Marty Supreme, as discussed, is in that territory, and the way it ties its aggro sports story to Jewish survival is eccentric and even questionable, but also a big part of what makes it exciting, so I’ll take it.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners goes a similar way. Unlike Marty Supreme it’s texturally lush rather than nervously attenuated — the camerawork by Autumn Durald is even in the wild action sequences as buttery as biscuits, rich with sun and moon and cloud-streaked twilight and old-fashioned electric lamplight — and for obvious reasons it’s easier to see up front the story of black survival in it (and by “obvious reasons” I mean American racism). But its main idea is so wild that it got me, a horror movie abstainer if not hater, to relish its vampire angle even when it got gruesome.

Set in the early 20th Century, Sinners focuses on Stack and Smoke, twin brothers — one jollier than the other, but both serious about their business — returned to their Mississippi homeland after some time in Chicago with a bundle to start up a juke joint. You may wonder why they came back, and in both cases it seems to have to do with women — in Smoke’s case, the conjur woman wife and mother of his dead child that he left behind; in Stack’s case, a white girl now grown and bitter, ditto.

It’s also hinted that the twins had to leave Chicago, related to how they got the bankroll. But there is something else going on that’s sensible but not spoken aloud. The photography, the beauty of the land and their loves, hints at it; the great blues playing and singing, happening all around, in the fields and on street corners, some of which they recruit for their joint — including that of their young cousin Sammie, who turns out to be a prodigy and to whom they have gifted Charlie Patton’s guitar (!) — pushes the hint. Their return is some kind of reckoning. They didn’t have leave; they had to come back.

But things get out of hand. The Klansmen from whom they have to buy the building and property, they seem to know how to handle. And they slip easily into their old network of black, Chinese and occasional white colleagues who can help make the thing go on the down-low. But they have not reckoned on the vampires.

The vampires are the really ingenious bit. They’re a poor white trio, seemingly all hill folk, but the chief, Remmick, is revealed to be from Ireland, the distant homeland of many a hillbilly. They come to the door of the juke joint on opening night with their hill music, saying they only want to come in to share it, and when they play you can see Stack and Smoke have a feel for what they’re doing — there’s something there to which they can relate, something about suffering and starving and getting above it at any cost. But they can’t trust it, or them, because the life they’ve led has taught them not to take that kind of chance.

“It’s this, isn’t it? Remmick says, referring to his white skin. He pleads for “fellowship.” He seems to know something relevant about the moneyed Klansmen, too. Still they turn them away.

[Spoilers] Is it important that the first breach is the white girl? I’m not sure. Nor am I sure whether they could have held them off in any case. I also haven’t fully figured out why Stack, when he turns, sees it the Irishman’s way (“We wasn’t never gonna be free”). I’m not sure whether Coogler figured it out, either — in fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t, and that rather than try to do so he let the great poetic mystery he was fortunate enough to find spool itself out. I do know it was sufficiently powerful to pull me into the sort of bloody defend-the-fort climax that usually makes me tune out, and that some of the resulting resonant images — like the way Sammie, whose songs Remmick especially covets, defeats him at last (hint: It’s blues power and vampire lore!) — cut like a sharp turn of phrase jumping out of an old blues song that you never could quite understand.

All the craft is splendid and extra credit to Ludwig Göransson, who takes straight blues and folk and spins them into mood music (the ethereal rise behind Smoke’s reunion with his wife gave me goosebumps). All the acting is great but I have to say Delroy Lindo — well, just Delroy Lindo. Everything he does as the tough old bluesman Delta Slim is gold, but the story he tells, after he and Smoke and Sammie drive past a chain gang of his old acquaintances, about how they once played for a big house full of white people, and how it ended up — I will never forget the way he looks at Sammie when the young man says “What happened,” then changes his mind; and the way, at the end of his story, that he slaps his leg and builds a rhythm and starts to blues-moan... Lindo is a movie all by himself.