MAKE THE MUSIC
MAKE THE MUSIC
By Joe Cooper
June 2025
Emerging filmmaker legend Ryan Coogler explores the power of pain and art in his latest work.
In 1932,
Los Angeles hosted the 10th summer Olympic games. In New York, the Chrysler and the Empire state had risen, with the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center not far behind it. (The photograph of a row of construction workers lunching on a beam in the sky, “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” was taken at that site). In Chicago, FDR was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention, and Al Capone began his prison sentence.
But it was also three years into the Great Depression, and in states like Mississippi, federal aid for the poor ran out; farming and agriculture declined rapidly; and if those challenges weren’t enough, Jim Crow laws kept Black people segregated, threatened and murdered on a daily basis. Sharecroppers worked the same cotton fields as their enslaved ancestors. Plantations had their own currency in the form of wooden coins. Juke joints popped up at rural crossroads (from the West African word “jook,” meaning rowdy or disorderly) and featured music, liquor, dancing and gambling.
It would be another three decades before the Civil Rights Act, four before Quincy Jones would produce Michael Jackson’s three most colossal albums, and six before Boyz n the Hood (1991), made by the late and groundbreaking director John Singleton. He would go on to teach at USC, where he would meet, instruct and inspire a young filmmaker named Ryan Coogler, whose first feature was the acclaimed Fruitvale Station (2013). The film stars a young Michael B. Jordan, who would remain a lead in most of Coogler’s subsequent films, like Creed (2015) and Black Panther (2018). These films, along with Wakanda Forever (2022) and his latest project, have surpassed $2B in global box office revenues, making him the most commercially successful Black filmmaker of all time. And with this recent film, he won a major achievement for a director: 25 years from now, the rights to the film will revert from the studio back to him, which historically has only happened with venerated filmmakers like George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino.
This film is Sinners, a glorious and original southern gothic, brimming with ideas and raw creativity, and the best film of the year so far. It will garner more than one Oscar nomination, and will further cement Coogler as a generation-defining filmmaker, and, in the running for the best of his generation.
And all of this before his 40th birthday: he turned 39 last month.
The godfather
of the blues, Robert Johnson, produced landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 that defined the “Delta blues” music of the state, often characterized by guitar (sometimes slide), harmonica and soulful vocals. The legend goes that he came upon a crossroads in Clarksdale, MI, where he encountered the devil and made a deal: his soul for the greatest guitar skills of all time. This mythical dance between music and the supernatural is one of the the underpinning ideas behind Sinners, one that will grow, evolve and burst into flames as the many braids of this tale twist together.
By the Civil War, Mississippi’s cotton production outpaced every other state, reaching 535 million in a single year. Daily quotas for slaves (and later, sharecroppers) could reach 200 pounds, or 5-7 bags’ worth. Some shifts lasted 18 hours. Which is one reason why church, and jukes, were some of only forms of relief, social connection, community and culture. For one night, or one service, sharecroppers and other “free” Black people could let loose. (As long as they avoided the Klan.)
Coogler’s film begins in Clarksdale on a balmy October day in 1932, when two twins return to town after seven years away – first as soldiers in World War I, and then as gangsters in Chicago, with a few stops in between – intent on opening their own juke that very night. Both men are played with subtle mastery by Michael B. Jordan, who’s been the DeNiro to Coogler’s Scorsese since their first film together. “The Smokestack Twins” is their buzzy moniker, with Smoke being the more wizened and stoic, and Stack delivering jokes and charm. The most incredible thing about this unforgettable gemini performance is how Jordan doesn’t ham it up as either one. You can always tell the difference, but the switches are understated: watching them pass a cigarette between them is not only mind bending, and a testament to film technology, but the work of a skilled and seasoned performer. With Denzel announcing his eventual retirement from acting, Jordan is the first star who comes to mind that can take his place: he has the range, the commitment, the looks and the confidence to cross genres and excel at anything he does.
Flush with cash and bootlegged Irish beer, the two start by purchasing an old mill from a crusty, tubby white man who assures them “there ain’t no Klan in these parts.” Then, in an expert example of story-driven exposition, the twins split up to make the rounds, meet and hire old friends, and return back at the new juke to get to work. Coogler has said that he wrote the script in a few months during the pandemic after researching his ancestors' roots in Mississippi and beyond. In one brief scene at a train station, he introduces us to several characters with whom the twins have backstory – and the conversations feel natural and authentic, versus the forced exposition of so many hastily produced streaming films, in which story points are spoken aloud so as to better reach viewers on screens or in other rooms.
First up is the musical and the spiritual center of the film: a guitar playing preacher’s son, sharecropper and cousin of the Smokestack Twins named Sammie (a.k.a. Preacher Boy) played with sensitivity and savvy by the young Miles Caton, whose successful music career is already in full swing. (Coogler and crew had to wait for a break in his tour schedule to shoot.) Preacher Boy envies the twins’ flight from Mississippi, and plans an escape of his own. His father calls the guitar a tool of the devil, in a nod to the Robert Johnson story. Needless to say, the minute the Twins return and share their plan, he’s in.
We meet a blues musician named Delta Slim, brought to feisty and entertaining life by Delroy Lindo, who is great to see after some time out of the spotlight. We’re introduced to Pearline (played with relish by Jayme Lawson), who is immediately taken by Preacher Boy’s impromptu performance with Slim. She’s married, apparently, but you’d never know it by her sultry slink away from the young man whose appetite, safe to say, has been duly whetted. And we first encounter Mary, a white-appearing but mixed race woman who shares a steamy history with Stack. There is another reference to a husband, though the bond between her and Stack still smolders, leaving little room for spouses. Mary is played with brimming confidence by Hailee Steinfeld, whom many viewers first met in the Coen brothers’ remake of the John Wayne film True Grit (2010), that time with Jeff Bridges, in which she played a plucky and determined orphan seeking revenge. I missed what she’d been in since then, so when I saw her, not only a grown adult, but bandying around zingers like "But then you stuck your tongue in my cooze and f*cked me so hard I thought you changed your mind” in her first minutes of screen time – my spirit left my body. It was like watching your kid sister smoke a cigarette. Steinfeld is all grown up, and also maintains a side career in vocal performance (she appears on the diversely inspired soundtrack).
While Stack faces this sexy grit, Smoke stays true to his past and visits the grave of a baby we come to know was his with Mary, the local conjurer / healer. She’s played with a luminous, queen-like presence by Wunmi Mosaku, in one of the most captivating performances of the film. You’d be forgiven for not recognizing her from goofy turns as a Time Variance Authority officer in Loki (2021) and last year’s motormouth hit, Deadpool X Wolverine. She inhabits Mary completely, and her chemistry with Jordan is instant and intoxicating. And here a crucial theme is introduced: what can we know about the supernatural? Smoke chides her for her voodoo practices, to which she responds that she prayed for him every day he was away, and he was kept alive. When he asks her why these prayers and practices never saved their infant daughter – she responds humbly and quietly: “I don’t know.”
Is the God that Preacher Boy’s father praises real? Do the evil spirits Mary holds ceremonies to keep away exist? Is there an afterlife, and how might it be defined? And what could be more threatening than the real life dangers that aggravated and ended the lives of so many Black people in this area of the country and the world?
Answer: vampires. The undead are alive in Clarksdale, with their sights set on Sammie and his musical powers. Anyone who wished for a spiritual sequel to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) may wait no more. But unlike that cult classic, the human and historical drama of Sinners is so rich, layered and expertly interwoven, we can’t help but ask – did the story need vampires?
Magical realism can play a curious but vital role in storytelling: one, it can make the medicine go down easier. Presenting racial atrocities, for instance, can be balanced, in a narrative way, by the introduction of an evil that is universal, beyond race (especially for viewers of the same race as the antagonists). It can serve as a useful metaphor: white communities have served as predators of Black ones, stealing and sabotaging their creativity and culture.
And sometimes it acts like a binding agent, rounding out the recipe of a work of art, like orange bitters in a gin martini, or Irish beer at a juke’s opening night. You don’t need it; but it makes it.
Sometimes,
I watch the beginning of Wakanda Forever just to experience the opening sequence. It is my favorite example of how to memorialize a fallen actor on film. The opening scene features the funeral procession for King T’Challa, played by the late Chadwick Boseman, who kept his cancer secret until his passing at age 41 in 2020. The notes of composer Ludwig Görranson’s opening track (“Nyana Wam,” meaning “my son”) sound their final tones, the audio fades away to a soft wind, and the classic Marvel logo animation is given over to images and clips of Boseman as Black Panther, in a moment of silence that is as powerful as any other in Coogler’s films. (A discussion of the wonderful talent exhibited across the much maligned Marvel Cinematic Universe is for another day; corn liquor would be required.)
When Sinners comes out on streaming, there is another moment I will replay, for inspiration and awe.
The twins and their posse, along with the help of two Chinese immigrant shopkeepers, Lisa and Bo (played by Helena Hu and Yao), somehow clean and decorate the juke, fry hundreds of catfish and set up the bar in a single afternoon in time for the night’s opening. (You don’t care about the logistics; you just want to go to the party.) The music is thumping, the liquor is flowing and the cash is stacking. And then Preacher Boy starts to make his music.
The film begins with the following voiceover: “There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future." As Preacher Boy performs his original tune “I Lied to You,” it begins bending and morphing, and strange things start to appear – figures, music and dancers out of context with the film’s era emerge. To say more would spoil; but the moment builds, the music evolving and charging, to a crescendo and a final tableau (a typically long and static statement shot featuring careful composition) that is as epic and coherent as any in film history, including:
The pre-intermission scene of fallen soldiers in Gone with the Wind (1939)
The Avengers assembled in front of Thanos in Avengers: Endgame (2019) (alright, it’s fan service, but still fun)
Many scenes in Kendrick Lamar’s video for the song “Love” (2017) (the Drake nonsense aside, he won a Pulitzer)
The ending scene of The Passion of the Christ (2004) featuring Jesus’ mother Mary (Mel Gibson, I know – but, great tableau)
The sole device used to pastel death in any Wes Anderson movie
It’s just great to keeping saying “tableau”
The sequence and tableau in Sinners is one of the most memorable visuals of the film, and finds its way into most post-viewing conversations. It can also be seen as a culmination of Coogler’s talents, team and vision, glimpses of which we have seen before, but unencumbered here by comic book canon or contemporary racial politics. The walls literally come down around the ideas he seeks to express, with all “departments” (costumes, sound, production design, et al) operating in unison – one of the biggest hallmarks of an excellent director.
This incredible team has been with Coogler for most of his films. Four time Oscar winning costume design legend Ruth Carter and production designer Hannah Bleacher plant us firmly in this time and place, with rich textures our eyes can touch: felt, tweed, wood, light and smoke. Casting director Francine Maisler works overtime to stack the cast with an incredible and entertaining range of performers. And if you have not memorized composer Ludwig Göransson’s name, you should – he is quickly becoming the Hans Zimmer of our generation, albeit with less commitment to rock and more to experimentation. Compare, for instance, the blossoming electronic fervor of the Tenet soundtrack, to this one: Sinners features original composition, actors from the film, blues legends, James Blake, Lars Ulrich from Metallica and Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains. Even the soundtrack tells the story of the film: music has the power to connect all.
For a film
about music, math stuck out to me as the story wove on. Allowing that there is no reason anyone should trust this writer with anything regarding numbers, consider:
One singular musical power
Sammie’s
Two twins
Smoke
Stack
Three pivotal romantic pairings:
Smoke and Annie
Stack and Mary
Sammie and Pearline
Four cultures
African American
Choctaw
Chinese
Irish
Regardless of whether numerical symbolism factored into Coogler’s writing, these symmetries and concentric rings are evidence of his incredible story crafting. To blend numbers, and music, and history, and race, and sex, and family and magic realism, into a single work that cost $90M to make and has yielded $350M as of today – all beginning with three months at a computer during the pandemic – is a reminder that however bleak the state of the world and the seemingly endless amount of pain we deliver to one another, incredible art is always possible. Even inevitable.
Which brings us back to the blues. What are the blues, anyway, but music born of pain and struggle? I gained the clearest understanding of this music during one scene that I missed during my first viewing but caught on the second: Delroy Lindo’s Delta Blues is telling Stack and Sammie a story as they drive through fields of cotton to their next destination. He and fellow Black musicians were playing at a party for white people; trouble ensued, and his friend was brutally mutilated, lynched and murdered. The story is an emblem of what New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik called the “terrorist apartheid state” in which freed Black people lived in the decades following the Civil War.
It is one of those shocking and disheartening stories about the human condition that leaves little room for comment or contextualization. Delta Blues stops; pauses; then starts slapping his thigh and singing. Stack gestures to Sammie, who picks up his guitar. The pain goes right into art. There is no intermediary, no filter, no therapeutic intervention. (Keep your ear out for clever sound design during this story that aids in the telling; Coogler knows how to tell stories featuring characters telling stories.)
And world history corroborates:
Mosaics and murals made by North African servi (slaves) during the Roman empire
Mandhubani paintings depicting daily lives of the lowest caste of people by Dalit women in India in the Stone Age
Paintings and carvings by bondsmen (slaves) during the Qing dynasty
Portraits and jewelry made by the kholopy (slaves) in Russia in the middle ages
Music and movies made by Jewish refugees during the Holocaust
Is pain at the heart of all great art? Is the one night at the twins’ juke all the more magical because of the mounting threats against it? (If your life is in danger from human Klansmen or the blood sucking undead – what’s the difference?) With the end in sight, with hope lost, what do you do?
The Romans are coming. The Brahmins hold unshakable power. The lynchman’s noose is hung. The vampires are outside the door.
The answers in Sinners are simple: Make the music. Fry the catfish. Sneak away for a quickie. And tell the people you love in your life that you love them. Because, sometimes, that’s all there is.