Judas and the Black Messiah

 

In the late 1960s, petty criminal Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), arrested and facing prison time, is recruited by FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) to infiltrate the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers and get close to its leader, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), whom the bureau has designated a threat. The closer that O’Neal gets to Hampton and his inner circle, the more money – and pressure – he receives from Mitchell to keep gathering intelligence…and worse.

 

Historical dramas are, sadly, too often staid and predictable affairs. Even when the performances do the subjects justice, the storytelling often follows a familiar arc. Kudos then to writer/director Shaka King and his collaborators Kenny and Keith Lucas for delivering an inspired-by-fact film that is powerful and full of tension.

 

Though the title suggests a simplistic morality, Judas and the Black Messiah is full of complex, multilayered performances. Kaluuya is charismatic and commanding as the young revolutionary Hampton, doomed to be murdered by police during a raid, a man given to both inspirational speeches and cult-like indoctrination alike. As O’Neal, Stanfield is quick-witted and increasingly (and intensely) conflicted, a sympathetic take on a treacherous and selfish figure. Plemons, who is well-versed in playing characters a great deal more dangerous or competent than they initially appear, gets a change of pace here. The manipulative Mitchell has enough of a conscience to be disturbed by his superiors’ nefarious COINTELPRO tactics yet lacks the will and introspection needed to affect change. That said, while Martin Sheen under heavy makeup brings name recognition and the requisite note of menace to J. Edgar Hoover, he feels miscast in a brief role that is more caricature than character.

 

Were Spike Lee in the director’s chair, Judas and the Black Messiah may have featured a number of awkward cuts to contemporary racial justice protests. Instead, King wisely trusts his audience to implicitly make these connections and keeps his film largely grounded in time and place, marking it as a period piece with resonance rather than a grand treatise on race and injustice some had hoped for. If nothing else, it is both more affecting and more interesting than many movies set during the same turbulent era, and it shows us that just because the outcomes are preordained, our response to and understanding of them needn’t be.