There is something so un-Hollywood about “Sinners,” where Capone-era gangsters battle vampires to the sounds of Delta blues, that you leave the theater not believing what you’ve seen. It’s like scoring your favorite powder stash or finding a new indie band. You know it is destined (maybe doomed) to blow up, but for now it’s all yours.
“Sinners” is the latest collab between writer-director Ryan Coogler and his muse, Michael B. Jordan. Before now the duo has made three films together, and all of them, even the 2014 indie darling “Fruitvale Station,” were based on something else – the Black Panther comics, the “Rocky” franchise. This is Coogler’s first wholly new feature. He tells The Atlantic, “I wanted it to feel like you were reading Salem’s Lot while listening to the best blues record, eating a bowl of spicy gumbo.”
Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Hollywood is calling this a horror movie. But don’t let that scare you away. “Sinners” is a horror movie like “Dazed and Confused” is a stoner movie, or “The Godfather” is a gangster movie. It has vampires and all their allergies – garlic, wooden stakes, silver, sunlight – but you barely see fangs until almost an hour in. Un-Hollywood defies convention.
For that first hour Coogler wants you to know life in the Deep South, after WWI and before the Depression, where Black families still live on plantations, picking cotton for wooden nickels, and the Ku Klux Klan is the real boogeyman lurking after dark, casually calling grown men “boys.”
“That’s just the way we talk around here,” says a plump white property owner. He’s selling an old barn to twin brothers, Smoke and Stack. They grew up down south before shipping off to Germany and then working for Capone in Chicago. Now, they’re back home and opening a juke joint. They recruit their cousin, Sammie Moore, aka Preacher Boy, to play the blues with a local legend, Delta Slim. They promise dancing and gambling and Irish beer. In return, they want what any gangster wants – money.
The Smokestack twins are played by Jordan. It’s yet another example of what I’ve been calling the “clone syndrome,” where big-name actors star opposite themselves. It’s a vibe right now, and like Robert Pattinson in “Mickey 17” Jordan pulls it off without much trouble. It helps the CGI is seamless, like an early scene where he passes a cigarette to himself.
If Smoke and Stack are the soldiers, Preacher Boy is the soul. Played by Miles Canton in his big-screen debut, he is the un-Hollywood hero – a shy, conflicted, talented protagonist who knows what he loves and might know how to get it, but first he is made to suffer.
“I met plenty of musicians,” his cousin tells him. “I ain’t never met a happy one.”
When the fangs come out “Sinners” kicks into overdrive, like a southern-fried version of “From Dusk Til Dawn,” pitting a small group of survivors against nasty odds. There’s even a sly nod to another pulp classic, “The Thing,” where chomping a whole clove of garlic will tell them if there’s a traitor in their midst. But Coogler is not a con. He’s paying homage on his own terms, which is about as un-Hollywood as you get in the age of Deadpool.
But the blood and bullets are for show. The heart of this film is the music. You will never forget the juke joint dance scene, where centuries (even millennia) of music collide. Same goes for the vampire assembly outside, where they snarl and swirl to an Irish folk standard.
“Sinners” is already blowing up. In two weeks, it has made nearly $100 million at the box office. People are going back for seconds and thirds. That’s Hollywood money for an un-Hollywood film, which could mean cash-grab sequels. But stick around for the mid-credits epilogue. You’ll learn Coogler is just fine with that – he might even expect it – because the tune remains the same.