The Killing of a Political Icon
‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ retells Fred Hampton’s rise — and the story of the man who helped the FBI murder him
Judas and the Black Messiah shows the rise of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton — and the story of the man who helped the FBI murder him.
Shaka king’s Judas and the Black Messiah begins and ends with its Judas, a man named William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). The socalled tragic messiah is Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya): founder of the multicultural political organization known as the Rainbow Coalition and the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, until his 1969 assassination by the FBI. Unlike Hampton, O’Neal is not a household name. Yet.
King’s film opens by restaging an infamous moment from the second Eyes on the Prize docuseries, in which O’Neal gave his first and only recorded interview. The former car thief and experienced criminal talks to the camera about how he joined the Black Panther Party in Chicago and, quickly falling into Hampton’s good graces, became the head of his security. Soon, O’Neal will also become an informant for the FBI. The raid that will claim Hampton’s life was the direct result of that collaboration, down to the details that O’Neal provided about the layout of the house where Hampton, his fiancee, and fellow Panthers were staying that evening.
The film is, wisely, not a biopic. It doesn’t trace the full lives, the respective rises and falls, of these men from beginning to end. Nor is it a robust history of the Black Panther Party in itself. It’s almost entirely concerned with the period of O’Neal’s double duty — which is to say, the last stretch of Hampton’s life. (O’Neal would remain an informant for some years after Hampton’s killing; once this was exposed, he had to go into witness protection.) On this tragic canvas, the film paints a complex picture of Hampton’s levitating rhetoric (which Kaluuya, stocky and sensational, delivers with power and aplomb). He’s adamant that he should not be the center of attention; it’s black lives, the lives of the race and class proletariat broadly, that should be the focus of the movement.
The appeal and achievement of King’s film is in the undercurrents about Hampton’s politics and lifestyle (which, as the film deftly illustrates, cannot be disentangled: the man lived his beliefs), about the Panthers’ community work and the police state’s utter resistance to it, and about the two men of its title: Judas. Messiah. With a title like that, who needs plot? King’s muscular, eventful, and wonderfully acted film is built on contrasts like these, whether it’s between the FBI (populated by G-Men played by the likes of Jesse Plemons, with Martin Sheen as J. Edgar Hoover himself ) and the Panthers, or between a world in which black lives have a value worth risking one’s life for and a world in which the fight for those lives is itself valueless.
It’s not that we ought to forgive O’Neal, nor even really that we owe it to him or ourselves to “understand” him. It’s a depiction whose central idea is the inevitable soul-rot of the Judas. And Stanfield, who, like Kaluuya, offers a standout performance, would be much less compelling without the broad and extraordinary cast of supporting actors drawing out these tensions and differences. What a bench: Dominique Fishback (as Hampton’s fiancee, Akua Njeri nee Deborah Johnson), Ashton Sanders, Dominique Thorne, Algee Smith, Robert Longstreet, Terayle Hill, and a brief but wonderful bit from Lil Rel Howery. And though the roles for women here are mighty (more Thorne, please!), the depictions don’t do justice to how numerous and robust they were in real life.
That may be the central shortcoming: Judas and the Black Messiah does so much, so tightly, and so well, that it makes you that much more aware of the nuances and essences it necessarily overlooks. The formation of the Rainbow Coalition almost feels too easy: Hampton walks into a gathering of poor whites with a Confederate flag hanging and wins them over within (in movie time) minutes; class-, race-, and big-picture-related conflict is conspicuously tamped down. And the true extent of O’Neal’s past as a criminal before the FBI catches him is intriguingly minimalized, in ways that make it easy — perhaps too easy — to feel sympathy for the man. The film can’t do everything. But what it does is quite something.
K. AUSTIN COLLINS