The blues, especially, “affirm not only U.S. Negro life in all of its arbitrary complexities and not only life in America in all of its infinite confusions, they affirm life and humanity itself in the very process of confronting failures and existentialistic absurdities. The spirit of the blues moves in the opposite direction from ashes and sackcloth, self-pity, self-hatred, and suicide. As a matter of fact the dirtiest, meanest, and most lowdown blues are not only not depressing, they function like an instantaneous aphrodisiac!”
That’s all over the first hour of “Sinners.” All that really happens is that two Michael B. Jordans, playing twin brothers, open the juke joint. They purchase the land, recruit the talent, procure the provisions, cut deals, mend emotional fences. It’s a warm, humorous, sexed, sexy stretch of moviemaking that earns our trust and lures our dread: I mean, when’s all this good feeling (one twin shoots two dudes, then we laugh) and catfish and lowdown living getting doomed? Coogler’s given himself a mess of rules to bend and adhere to: those of vampires, arguably zombie movies too, Jim Crow, the musical, the music video, the western, what Quentin Tarantino would call the revenge-o-matic, griot culture, church dogma, passing for white, passing for alive.
But it’s Murray who’s coming through loud and clear, even after the vampires show up armed with banjo, fiddle and guitar, claiming to have come all this way to hear such beautiful, powerful, undeniable music. The blues is some intangible quality that inheres within this depiction of Blackness, the way camp does in certain queer art. That snarling “Ya Ya” song on “Cowboy Carter” is a kind of prime-time blues number that Beyoncé rides with no saddle.
But these are both works worried about the legacy of a people and a way of life, of the blues as an art form and an exuberant state of mind, all on the brink on extinction. This work is fighting — occasionally with itself. But Beyoncé and Coogler have sensed that something vital is at stake right now, and it might be the fabric of history; their work knows those histories have always been in jeopardy.
If the minstrels in “Sinners” are also vampires, and the vampires want to steal Black art, they’re not going very far with it. They mosh and jig around in the dirt, 200 feet from the juke joint, encircling the head vampire, a white Irishman who goes by Remmick (Jack O’Connell) and has real lead-singer-if-the-band-was-a-cult energy. They look like they’re having a sexy time and probably smell like teen spirit. The movie’s set at the dawn of the recording industry, and yet the allegory doesn’t feel like a stand-in for copyright infringement but a crisis of faith.
