GETTING THE BLUES

Theoretically, the blues are relatively easy to play but harder to feel deep down in your soul—just as Willie Brown explains in Walter Hill's Crossroads: you need the "mileage." As much as Black Panther director Ryan Coogler attempts to play his own version of the blues in his culturally themed vampire movie Sinners, it's hard not to get the impression that he still has a relatively superficial understanding of the form—similar in many ways to the Coens' silly O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which also included a Robert Johnson-like figure, that legendary bluesman with his own mythic lore involving the Devil, poison, and the twelve-bar blues.

What was especially frustrating about Sinners was that it had so much potential to deliver a high-concept popcorn movie but ultimately reverts to being little more than a revenge porn B-movie variation on Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn. It's a shame, because with a little more care taken with the pacing and structure of the screenplay, I feel there were some rich themes to explore—not least the notion of the Faustian pact artists make in pursuing their art, and the separatist idea of protecting one form of music within one racial group from another—here meaning the blues from "rotten-toothed" white people.

Make no mistake: Sinners is essentially a black supremacist movie—and why not? The notion of keeping a form of music homogeneous to its ethnic creators is a compelling angle, especially when the villains (white rednecks) are so easy to identify, much in the same way as Russians in spy movies and Arabs in terrorist-themed ones. Unfortunately, there is no greater sophistication beyond that. A more complex view of the cross-fertilisation of musical genres—such as blues, country, and bluegrass—would have made for a far more conceptually interesting film and an even greater soundtrack. As it stands, all we get is a conventional, middle-of-the-road soundtrack and fairly straightforward characters who could just as easily belong in a typical slasher movie as in this uneasy highbrow/lowbrow hybrid.

The American film critic Armond White summarised the fundamental flaw in the modern "black consciousness" informing the ideas of Sinners in his recent article for the National Review:

"Coogler’s one-dimensional rehash of black American history degrades the legacy of the Southern blues, a subject that playwright August Wilson explored in his best dramas — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The latter featured Delroy Lindo in an astonishing Broadway performance as a man battling the internalized power and anguish of the blues and the church. But Lindo’s role as Delta Slim in Sinners degrades August Wilson’s concept so laughably that it proves Coogler’s generation has lost connection to black history, art, and spirituality, traducing all that into Hollywood trash. Like the trite Black Panther, Sinners is just ethnic heresy."

And when the sun finally sets on the final act of Sinners, it's hard to come away feeling anything for the paper-thin characters and their sacrifice made in blood (it is supposed to be a vampire movie, after all). The weight of its themes is betrayed by the poor execution of its story and character work. And perhaps most shamefully, the power of the blues is never fully unleashed — not even in the attempts at a transcendent, time-jumping sequence in which the future decades of Black music are brought together in a séance of sorts at Club Duke, a scene clearly inspired by the bonkers ending of Damien Chazelle's Babylon (2022).

Being generous, however, I will say that the production team did a great job recreating The Sugar Shack, the iconic painting of dancing figures by Ernie Barnes that appeared on the cover of Marvin Gaye's 1976 album I Want You, during the Club Duke scenes.

It's just a shame they didn't have the music to match.