"Sinners" is seismic moviemaking, a tale of twin brothers in the Jim Crow-era Mississippi that is so forcefully alive that you just might quake in your boots. It will cut you deep into your soul and shake you - call it punk filmmaking that is blunt and never heavy-handed but definitely in-your-face in ways most movies in this decade have not been. After it was over, I wanted to scream "Hallelujah!"
The twins are gangsters from Chicago and previous WWI vets, Smoke and Stack Moore (both played flawlessly by Michael B. Jordan), who settle back in their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi. They buy a sawmill from a landowner whom the brothers are convinced is a klansman, or knows some klan members. Using money stolen from the Chicago Outfit, they decide to use the sawmill as a juke joint with some blues musicians playing the night away. The musicians include Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Michael Canton), Smoke and Stack's cousin and a hell of a guitarist - his sounds could summon the Devil himself and musicians from the past and future; the married Pearline (Jayme Lawson) a hellacious singer whom Sammie takes a liking to, and Delta Slim, a pianist (Delroy Lindo, always a welcome presence) who is content to just have small change to buy alcohol - he cannot believe the Moore brothers can pay him 40 bucks a night. The distraught Annie, Smoke's wife (Wunmi Mosaku), will do the cooking and is also a Hoodoo practitioner (which will come in handy towards the explosive ending). There is also an Asian couple, the local grocery shopkeepers named Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li and Yao), who supply the food (for historical context in terms of Jim Crow laws, the couple has two different grocery stores, one services white people and the other services blacks). Cornbread, a sharecropper (Omar Miller), will be the bouncer since everyone needs extra bread if they can get it. Speaking of sharecroppers, some of them attend the juke joint paying with wooden coins since real money was not given to them for working the fields. Smoke wants cash yet Stack reminds his brother they have cater to all black people if they want to keep the joint thriving, even those working on plantations.
As a textbook example of Black Southern culture ("Eve's Bayou" is one of the few notable examples) with background blues music and religion not to mention Hoodoo practices, "Sinners" covers a lot of historical ground just on that basis. Added to it are the Moore brothers who can use violence when necessary to protect what is theirs - they want at least one night of freedom. "Sinners" would already be a wondrously alive movie with all these elements, and then it segues to vampiric ground with an Irish vampire named Remmick (Jack O'Connell), hunted by Choctaw vampire hunters, who can sing but not the blues. Remmick wants entrance to the juke joint, believing that vampirism can bring an end to racism, and has brought along a Klan couple whom he has already turned to the dark side. The scenes of Remmick and the couple performing Irish maladies after being denied access to the juke joint are as bone-chilling and mildly gut-wrenching as any horror film of late. There is some gore in "Sinners" but it is mercifully not wall-to-wall violence and it does not need to be. The foggy atmosphere and the moonlit scenes outside the juke joint, along with the towering spiritual music, are enough to make your spinal column shift a little.
"Sinners" is a movie that vibrates with life, and the performances help make this unusual story with historical context all the more vivid. Whether it is Michael B. Jordan as the twins (their final scene is an emotional powerhouse), the scary Remmick who shows he can have a good time dancing merrily like an Irishman, Delroy Lindo as a man who has seen everything and sympathizes with chain gangs, Wunmi Mosaku's feeling of regret as Smoke's wife, Michael Canton's guilt-ridden Sammie at getting too close to evil or Hailee Steinfield's as the only white woman in the joint, "Sinners" is equal parts gratifying, soulful and it pierces your mind, body and soul from start to finish.
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