'Judas and the Black Messiah' is pure dynamite: Movie review

It should not come as a surprise that a film called Judas and the Black Messiahisn't interested in playing it cool. This is a story of biblical proportions, where what's at stake is not simply the life of a man or a party or even a movement, but a whole brilliant future that could have been — but that we know, from the vantage point of 2021, turned out not to be.

But the fire roaring at its center is one fueled by humanity, not history. Director Shaka King resists the temptation to flatten real-life figures into easy roles like hero, victim, villain, or saint, or to bop the audience over the head with constant reminders about the gravity of it all. His insistence on showing these people as people first pays off. Judaslands all the harder framed as a story about us, rather than one about gods from on high.

It's the late 1960s and the civil rights movement is gaining steam, to the apoplectic outrage of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen). He warns his G-men that the single greatest threat to the American way of life (by which he means the white, middle-class, American way of life) would be the emergence of a "Black messiah" who unites the Communist, New Left, and anti-war movements under the banner of racial equality. Someone like, perhaps, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the charismatic deputy chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. If only they could find the right weapon to use against him.

Enter Bill O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a thief who's picked up by the FBI for impersonating an officer to steal a car. He's offered a choice: Get sent to jail, or agree to infiltrate the Panthers and walk free. For Bill, who has no great interest in politics, it seems an acceptable tradeoff, particularly coming from a handler as reasonable as Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons). And Mitchell's condescending assurances that the Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan are basically the same thing tend to go down a lot smoother over expensive steaks and fancy scotch.

Stanfield has a tough needle to thread as Bill, given that we're primed to dislike him from the get-go. (He is, after all, the Judas of the title.) But Stanfield's unpredictable energy makes it difficult to pin down Bill as either a dirty rat or a true believer, and the script by King and Will Benson allows to understand every choice he makes, even if we can't excuse or condone them. Mitchell's hold around him tightens around him so carefully that by the time Bill realizes how deep he's in, he's already drowning.

Kaluuya, so riveting in everything from Black Mirrorto Get Outto Widows, unleashes the full force of his magnetism as Fred. When he's on stage roaring about revolution, there's little doubt this is a man with the power to change the world, and it's plain to see why others adore him or fear him. But we see a gentler, funnier, and heck, cuterside of him, too, in his tender romance with fellow Panther Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback in a breakthrough performance). He's earned his larger-than-life stature as a revolutionary leader, but he's also just a guy trying his best, and he's no less impressive or significant for it.

And his fate is no less tragic. The careful attention that King pays his two leads extends as well to the entire world around them — to the other Chicago groups that join with the Panthers in a Rainbow Coalition of oppressed people across races, to the local kids who turn up to help the group rebuild after a setback, to the media that subtly and not-so-subtly demonize the Panthers. These scenes build a context for not just who Fred is but what he means, then and now.

Bit by bit, they also paint a picture of the better world that Hampton and other activists were fighting for in 1969, and that still has yet to be fulfilled half a century later. At the start of Judas, the fact that we know how it ends feels like a bittersweet reassurance — we might not like where this is headed, but at least we won't be surprised. The more intimately we come to know these characters,, however, and the harder we look at the shimmering future they imagined, the less anything in Judasfeels like a foregone conclusion.

When the end finally comes, it's shocking and it's not. King spares us the worst of the graphic violence, but that hardly lessens the sting. And yet, by grounding Fred Hampton's story in human-scale weakness and strength, the film ensures it needn't end with him. In its potent combination of heartbreak and hard-won hope, it reminds us to take his words to heart: "Where some see despair, I see ground zero for the revolution."

Judas and the Black Messiahpremiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It debuts in theaters and on HBO Max Feb. 12.

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