Smoke and Stack, twin brothers both played by Michael B. Jordan in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, have whole pulp paperbacks’ worth of backstory the audience never sees: An abusive Mississippi childhood and young-adult romances, tours of duty in World War I, and a stint working with Al Capone in Chicago before they evidently ripped off the mob, pitting the Irish against the Italians and absconding with alcohol from both sides. Of course, most of this stuff—rough childhoods, Jim Crow struggles, the Great War, and prohibition (if perhaps not the working relationship with Mr. Capone)—is well within the realm of believability. But Coogler, who came to big-studio prominence revitalizing Rocky through the semi-sequel Creed and providing Marvel with its likely permanent high point Black Panther, has a way with mythologizing his characters without forgetting the very real pain that informs their lives. He can give a man (or two) a superhero-like backstory with a straight face. Sinners, which the filmmaker himself has been touting as his first wholly original feature (Fruitvale Station, his debut, was based on a real-life tragedy), is both Coogler’s most fantastical and most closely rooted in the history of American racism. It’s pulp from the heart and the gut.
Coogler picks up Smoke, the more sober-minded brother, and Stack, the flashier one, as they return to Mississippi in 1932. They intend to use their stockpile of alcohol and various local connections to start up a juke joint, first recruiting their younger cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), something of a blues guitar prodigy (and, naturally, the son of a disapproving pastor). In amazingly short order, they gin up a crew that includes older second musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), cook Grace (Li Jun Li), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and a couple of ex-lovers: Stack’s mixed-race childhood sweetheart Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), though her recollections of the last time they met are anything but childish; and Smoke’s beloved Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), bonded to him through tragedy.
Really, the first hour or so of Sinners consists largely of Smoke and Stack running errands; they close on the needed property together, then split up to take care of various business. (Given the abbreviated time frame, Smoke suggests pushing the opening; Stack wants to barrel forward.) Coogler, fresh off a couple of Marvel adventures that needed to maintain a certain shared-universe pace even as he gave them his own imprint, luxuriates in the time he’s able to take here, collaborating with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw to bring out the beauty of the Mississippi fields and skies while letting darkness envelop the individual characters at times. Even before night falls, characters’ faces are often half-covered in shadow. 65mm film, split between Ultra Panavision and IMAX cameras, provides a higher-contrast look than the same team’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, where potentially striking images were often lost in murk or digital tweaking.
Once the party gets underway, there are some romantic and personnel complications, and at one point, the brothers seem to be shooing Sammie away from their crime-adjacent life. It’s one moment in the film that feels inexplicable rather than indicative of unseen backstory, given that they brought him into the establishment in the first place. But these objections also turn moot when a trio of white folks turn up at the nascent club’s door and ask to be admitted. Suspicious, the staff initially denies entry, but the promise of patronage—the perilous economics of running a beloved juke joint quickly come into focus—is awfully tempting.
Emphasis on awful: Though it doesn’t come into focus until about halfway through the picture, trailer-watchers will have surmised that these interlopers singing Irish folk songs (and played by Jack O’Connell, Lola Kirke, and Peter Dreimanis) are actually vampires, supposedly drawn out by the power of Sammie’s veil-piercing musicianship. The devil really does maintain an abiding interest in blues guitar.
Bold as this mid-movie pivot is, it doesn’t quite do justice to the eclecticism of Coogler’s film. Sinners is a horror movie, yes, and a siege-based one that owes a bit to the 1996 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn. (One can name loftier influences like Assault On Precinct 13, but this is a movie where a pair of criminal brothers spend the night at a raucous bar, eventually fighting off vampires; to a ’90s kid, the influence will be as plain as The Phantom Menace’s upon the three-ring climax of Black Panther.) That means it also resembles a Western and a gangster picture—and for a few passages it’s also a concert movie; that’s especially obvious in the version showing at real IMAX theaters, where several music performances pop out to the towering 4:3 aspect ratio, looming over the audience like a Baby Boomer-approved rock band. The longest of these musical sequences is an ecstatic time-bender that feels like Coogler performing his own Depression-era riff on the Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby, tracing a cultural lineage where so many would see the opportunity for stricter limitations. Sinners isn’t a hodgepodge, but it’s remarkably at ease with its mix-and-match approach to genre; it’s one of those wonderful experiences that seem dreamed up before anyone had a chance to cite a how-to screenwriting guide.
As ever, Coogler seems equally interested in Black resilience and the monstrous culture of racism that requires it, though some specific story details complicate the notion that white people are simply vampires eager to drain Black culture of its vitality. The vampires’ still-nefarious aims are thornier and creepier than garden-variety racism, though there’s some cathartic addressing of that business as well. One obvious reading involves assimilation, and the question of how or whether it’s possible for a marginalized or oppressed group to meaningfully hold their ground, and what that might cost.
Smoke and Stack’s respective roles in this vision of a hive-minded threat probably could have been teased out a little earlier, or more clearly. Jordan, Coogler’s ride-or-die favorite actor, is typically magnetic in both roles, but it’s not one of those dual performances so precise that vocal affect or mannerism alone can differentiate the characters. (Coogler seems to sense this, breaking out color-coded hats for the brothers to wear for much of the first half.) Sometimes the specific twinning of the characters just feels like a practical solution to avoid cutting away from Jordan early on.
Yet despite moments where it feels like we’re getting glimmers of characters rather than full-bodied portraits, Sinners is also the rare blockbuster-scale entertainment to become richer and ever more compelling as it sprawls onward, even as Coogler breaks out an ending, an epilogue, a postscript, and an encore; one ought to stay through the full credits for the experience. This is how the concert vibes come back into play. If Coogler has been doing stadium shows for a few years, this Sinners is a 140-minute set at a great club, and somehow no smaller for it.
Director: Ryan Coogler
Writer: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku
Release Date: April 18, 2025
