REVIEW: The culture war in 'Sinners' leaves blood on the floor

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“Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s wildly entertaining mash-up of genres, tonal flavours and stunning production values, arrives just in time to meet its moment.

Veering confidently between pulpy and profound, this ambitious, if occasionally uneven, meditation on art, appropriation, betrayal and redemption never sacrifices what’s on its mind for its primary aim, which is to shock and enthrall. There’s a culture war raging within the throbbing, thrumming 1930s juke joint that serves as its primary backdrop; viewers should rest assured – or be forewarned – that this particular skirmish will leave blood on the floor.

As the film opens, a preacher’s son named Sammie Moore is making his way to his father’s Clarksdale, Mississippi, church on a Sunday morning, clutching the splintered fretboard of a guitar to his battered body. His father had warned him that playing music for “drunkards and philanderers” would invite evil into his life; “Sinners” then doubles back to the day before, when Sammie’s twin cousins, Smoke and Stack, return to their hometown to seek their fortune converting an old sawmill into a nightspot providing food, drink and music for the sharecroppers, laborers and shopkeepers who keep the vibrant rural community afloat. Aficionados cognizant of Clarksdale’s role in the Delta blues will want to know: There may not be a crossroads in “Sinners,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t life-and-death turning points.

Played by Michael B. Jordan in a seamless double performance, Smoke and Stack bring a history with them that Coogler doles out in enticing increments. They’ve made some money, and enemies, working for Al Capone up in Chicago. They also left two women behind when they set out for Illinois: Annie, a quietly formidable root worker played with commanding presence by Wunmi Mosaku, and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s former girlfriend who confronts him with foulmouthed wounded pride when she bumps into him at the train station. As this October Saturday unfolds, Smoke and Stack round up old friends and neighbors to get the juke off the ground, while Sammie – cradling the guitar that his cousins told him once belonged to blues legend Charlie Patton – prepares to make his debut that night.

Intercutting between the twins and their parallel storylines, Coogler introduces the characters who will factor into his movie’s Grand Guignol of a denouement: a dirt-farming couple named Bert and Joan (Peter Dreimanis and Lola Kirke), who have taken in a stranger named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) after he says he’s been attacked by Choctaw tribe members. It’s during this meet-not-so-cute that viewers get their first hint of what Coogler has in store: For its first hour or so, “Sinners” might be a gorgeous, richly textured portrait of Black survival and pluralistic coexistence in the Jim Crow South, but when reality comes knocking, it’s with red eyes flashing and fangs bared.

The gruesome climax of “Sinners” indulges all the squishy, squirting, sanguinary deliverables of the grind-house classics that clearly inspired Coogler, from George Romero’s allegorical zombie flicks to the nonchalant mayhem of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (structurally, “Sinners” owes a stylized hat tip to Rodriguez’s deliriously bonkers 1996 B movie “From Dusk Till Dawn”). Throw in series like “The Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” as well as the oeuvre of Jordan Peele, and you get almost 20 years of filmmakers processing contemporary society and racial politics through the metaphoric lens of graphic horror – an appropriate lens, no doubt, but one that is on the brink of playing itself out.

Still, even as it succumbs to literal and figurative overkill, “Sinners” transcends those limitations. Since making his stunning feature debut in 2013 with “Fruitvale Station,” followed by supremely skilled franchise installments of “Black Panther” and “Creed,” Coogler has proved himself to be a filmmaker of impressive self-awareness and superb taste, assembling fantastic acting ensembles and building environments for them to work in that pulse with colour, texture, detail and life.

Here, Coogler has reteamed with frequent collaborators Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler, whose costumes and production design provide extravagant visual beauty to an enterprise that is meant to be anything but pretty; Ludwig Göransson composed a musical score that ranges from a sinuous guitar to swelling, old-school orchestrations. As a lush, gorgeously produced big-screen movie, “Sinners” bursts with the kind of energy and visionary lyricism that bring pleasure to even the most sadistic pain its characters endure.

“Sinners” possesses the requisite high-tech bells and whistles, but for Coogler, actors are the most dazzling special effect. Jordan delivers a subtle, charismatic turn as Smoke and Stack in a trick of cinematic legerdemain that lets viewers forget almost immediately that they’re the same actor. Delroy Lindo provides well-judged comic relief as Delta Slim, a grizzled harp player the twins enlist to back up Sammie on his big night; but it’s R&B prodigy Miles Caton, as Sammie, who makes his own screen acting debut every bit as spectacular as his character’s triumphant gig at the twins’ juke. Together with Mosaku, as Annie, Caton gives “Sinners” the welcome ballast of soul and solemnity, ensuring that what could have been a piece of grisly escapism lands with the inescapable ring of real grief.

Every bit as busy and bustling as cosmopolitan Clarksdale, where Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao) run the town’s main mercantile, “Sinners” achieves greatness in one breathtaking, masterfully orchestrated scene. It comes just as Saturday night at the juke is achieving ecstatic proportions, when Coogler adroitly slips into magical realism to illuminate the ways that music has connected people and stories and truths and traumas through time immemorial. Whether they know it or not, everyone brings their ancestors with them to a party that, even at its wildest, can purify and heal.

That’s just what’s so threatening to the malefactors who encroach on the loud, warmly lit roadhouse of “Sinners,” which stands as both beacon and symbol for this political era. Coogler obviously conceived and filmed his movie long before our current time, but it feels sprung directly from it, as the country’s past is being frantically erased and rewritten in any number of cultural institutions in Washington and beyond.

Ultimately, the cosmic fight between good and evil turns into a battle of the bands, a conceit that asks Scottish-Irish ballads to do some unwelcome dirty work (pour one out for “Wild Mountain Thyme”) but whose point is nonetheless potent: Tribalism and opportunistic alliances might satisfy our most primal hungers, but they’ll leave us starving in the long run. “Sinners” gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

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Three and one-half stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains strong bloody violence, sexual content and profanity. 137 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.