MOVIES
“Judas and the Black Messiah” is mesmerizing.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” is my kind of dramatized Chicago history. It’s a real movie, for one thing — brash, narratively risky, full of life and sneaky wit (even if the dominant tone is one of foreboding) and brimming with terrific actors.
It’s also a leap and a bound ahead of the recent Netflix production “Trial of the Chicago 7,” to name one enjoyable, speechifying fraud now available for streaming. Premiering Feb. 12 in theaters and on HBO Max, director and co-writer Shaka King’s bracing film culminates in the deadly, much-maligned raid coordinated by the FBI, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and Chicago police officials, targeting Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton. The movie is too interesting to worry about making things easy or cathartic for a Black or a white or any kind of audience. Instead, it views the events through a troubling prism of a lesserknown real-life character, the Judas of the title.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” deals with Hampton, played by the British actor Daniel Kaluuya of “Get Out” and “Black Panther.” He’s excellent, conveying Hampton’s public and private sides with equal parts fire and ice.
But the film focuses largely on FBI informant William O’Neal, a one-time petty thief who worked his way up the chain of command to become head of Hampton’s Black Panther security. He then provided intelligence that led to the assault on Hampton’s apartment. The movie dwells in a clammy, claustrophobic space: O’Neal’s guilty conscience. Director King dares to humanize that man and that space; as a result, a fable of the betrayed and the betrayer has somewhere to go.
LaKeith Stanfield, of “Atlanta” and “Sorry to Bother You,” portrays O’Neal as a fascinating array of evasions, secrets and conflicted loyalties, all eating at the character from the inside. Jesse Plemons, a hypnotic, contained presence in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” and “Game Night,” makes Mitchell a lawman of ambiguous complexity, dealing with his own, brief struggle with a guilty conscience.
Bureau director J. Edgar Hoover was out to eliminate Hampton; as he once said, his mission was to prevent “the rise of a messiah that would unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement” at a time when America didn’t feel destined to hold together. (We’ll see your 1968 and raise you a 2021.) Martin Sheen’s brief appearances as Hoover in “Judas and the Black Messiah” have a way of taking you straight out of the movie; the makeup makes it look like the FBI is being run by Al Lewis of Grandpa Munster fame. Not everything in “Judas and the Black Messiah” works, and the second half struggles here and there to maintain the momentum set up so beautifully by the first half.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” doesn’t sugarcoat Hampton’s inflammatory rhetoric, and it certainly doesn’t soft-pedal the coordination of federal, Cook County and Chicago authorities in the killing of Hampton.
In a film that slightly shortchanges Hampton’s own screen time, the scenes between Kaluuya and Dominique Fishback as Deborah Johnson, Hampton’s co-worker and eventual lover, lend an authentic warmth.
King’s previous feature, the low-keyed comedy “Newly-weeds” (2013), indicated a shrewd, mellow comic streak that comes through in various short films he made en route to the plainly heavier territory of “Judas and the Black Messiah.” The visual assurance of “Judas” is formidable, owing a lot to cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (who shot several Steve McQueen films, “12 Years a Slave” among them) and effective, relatively low-budget evocations of late 1960s Chicago, though filming took place in Cleveland.
Chicago’s history of brutal, underhanded institutional bloodshed is, to put it mildly, history we’re all living with, still. “Judas and the Black Messiah” may stir the pot some, and I’m glad. The vividly wrought history feels like the present, and the actors seize the day.