A daring, disturbing depiction of a city at war
IN DETROIT, director Kathryn Bigelow concentrates and refracts the 1967 riots in that eponymous city through the lens of one of its most notorious yet largely forgotten incidents, when a group of white police officers tortured and murdered a group of teenagers at the Algiers Motel, then covered it up.
Of a piece with Bigelow’s Oscar-winning 2008 Iraq drama The Hurt Locker and 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, the tense, harrowingly intimate Detroit rounds out a trilogy of fact-based, fog-of-war interpretive histories. Even though it’s based on an episode that occurred half a century ago, it feels like her timeliest movie yet.
The film takes viewers to the early hours of Sunday, July 23, when the Detroit police conducted a raid on a party being thrown for a soldier returning from Vietnam. As the police were leading their charges out of the building, a crowd gathered and a disturbance ensued that would lead to five days of fires, looting, mass arrests, police brutality and more than 40 deaths, including that of a 4-year-old girl who was mistaken for a sniper. That moment is captured with sudden, heart-seizing clarity in Detroit, which plunges the audience into the chaos, paranoia and pent-up rage that engulfs the city’s African-American community.
But just when the viewer thinks that Detroit will be a “tick-tock” narrative of the mayhem and socio-political upheaval that defined the rebellion, Bigelow makes a radical shift, following a singer named Larry Reed (Algee Smith) as he and his group, the Dramatics, prepare for a set at Detroit’s Fox Theatre. When the show is cancelled because of security issues, Larry and the band’s manager, Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) take refuge at the Algiers.
It’s at this point that Detroit goes from being a bluntly effective you-are-there exercise to something far more daring, sophisticated and unforgettably disturbing. Rather than treat the Algiers as yet one more data point within a timeline that eventually included the arrival of the National Guard and, finally, the US Army, Bigelow drills down into one of American history’s most egregious cases of abuse of police power, bringing it to life with visceral detail.
The broad, historical contours are these: In an act of teenage bravado, a young man fired a starter pistol out the window of the motel. Police arrived, almost certainly killed him (although accounts varied) and, in an effort to find the gun, proceeded to terrorise a group of young black men and two white girls.
It’s in this bizarre, sadistic sequence that the context for the violence and rage of the Detroit riots comes into focus, as decades of intimidation and impunity on the part of the mostly white Detroit police department take the form of racist animus, cruelty and brazen murder. Led by a particularly noxious fictionalised character named Krauss (Will Poulter), the cops are alternately frightened and arrogant as the situation spirals into a waking nightmare.
Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental. – Washington Post Detroit will screen at cinemas nationwide on Friday, August 18. Detroit