Coogler, Ryan

The director goes boldly out there in his fifth feature, a genre-defying, mind-bending shoot-em-up that stars Michael B. Jordan as twins.Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history. Here, when a Black musician plays the blues at a juke joint, he isn’t just performing for jubilant men and women. He is also singing to the history that flows through them from generations of ancestors to others not yet born. Like Coogler, the musician is a kind of time traveler, blasting off into horizonless possibilities.Few American filmmakers in recent memory have risen with the dizzying speed of Coogler, who a decade ago vaulted to attention with “Creed,” his franchise rethink that took the “Rocky” series off life support. With his ensuing “Black Panther” superhero movies, Coogler rose higher still, proving that he could retain both a distinct aesthetic sensibility and a sense of human proportion (and stakes) even in the Marvel movie factory. His vision of Wakanda, the otherworldly country that the Black Panther calls home, works in part because of its far-out visions and technological wonders. Yet if it’s persuasive it’s because in Coogler’s Wakanda, you are also never far from the reality that’s roiling right outside the cinematic frame.That reality is even more vividly present in the dusty roads and bustling vibrancy of “Sinners,” which takes place in 1932 in and around Clarksdale, Miss., a Delta town tucked in the northwest corner of the state. There, amid endless fields of cotton, Sammie (the appealing newcomer Miles Caton), a sweetly sincere son of a preacher man, yearns to play music. He gets a break when his cousins, the identical twins Smoke and Stack — both played with luminous feeling by Michael B. Jordan — transform a derelict building into a juke joint. There, Sammie all but burns the place down with his resonant voice and twangy dobro, a guitar with a provenance as devilish as that of the bluesman Robert Johnson.Coogler, who also wrote the screenplay, gets his game on early in “Sinners,” which opens with a grabber of a scene and a dazed, bloodied Sammie bursting into his father’s church mid-sermon, a jaggedly broken-off guitar neck clutched in one hand. A few beats later and the story skips back to the recent past. Such temporal scrambling is overused; presumably because “Citizen Kane” continues to cast its shadow over film schools. But as intros go, this one is enough of a question mark to stir your curiosity, which only intensifies with the entrance of Smoke and Stack, syncopated dandies with high style and a heavy past, who’ve endured war, survived Al Capone’s Chicago and held fast to smoldering romances.Smoke and Stack are two sides of the same charismatic coin; it’s hard not to see the filmmaker and his star in similar terms. The first time you see the twins they’re waiting on the building’s owner. Stack has on a sharp reddish fedora and tie, a handkerchief neatly tucked in a breast pocket. There’s a hint of gold in his ready smile, and more than a suggestion of malice. His brother is wearing a blue cap and soon dragging on a cigarette, tendrils of smoke wafting across his sterner, more melancholic face. The effect of these lookalikes is lightly destabilizing, and when Stack leans across to light Smoke’s cigarette, you may find yourself leaning toward the screen, mesmerized by the synchronicity of bodies and digital wizardry.Once the twins seal the deal, the other narrative pieces begin falling in place. There are many, some of which fit together better than others. Delroy Lindo shows up as another bluesman, Delta Slim, as do Li Jun Li and Yao as the grocer wife and husband, Grace and Bo Chow. Each brother reconnects with an old lover — Smoke with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Stack with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) — mirrored romances that never line up as neatly as Coogler seems to intend. Annie breaks your heart; Mary works your nerves. That would be less of a problem if Mary, a woman with a fraught identity, wasn’t burdened with so much symbolism. Mosaku, by contrast, is playing a flesh-and-blood woman, not a conceit, and her reunion with Jordan’s Smoke is so beautifully felt (and smokin’ hot) it deepens the emotional texture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More