In his five-feature directing career, Ryan Coogler has rarely made the same movie twice – and it’s only “rarely” rather than “never” because he came back for the second Black Panther movie, though it didn’t even feature the star of the first film. The things his films have in common, though, are two words starting with E: electricity and excitement. Coogler brings a visual energy – there’s another word starting with E – that always elevates his material. (That’s four, though I’ll stop mentioning words that start with E now.) The same is true and then some with Sinners, though to talk about exactly how this is different from his other films is to get into spoiler territory, if you happen to have been spared these spoilers before now.

We can definitely say that this is Coogler’s first period piece, as Sinners follows twin troublemakers known as the Smokestack brothers, played by perennial Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan. (Jordan only missed Black Panther: Wakanda Forever among Coogler’s films, and only because his character was already dead.) One has red featured on his natty suits, one has blue. Smoke and Stack are feared hoodlums who have recently been spending their time in Prohibition era Chicago of 1932, but they’ve returned to their hometown in the Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint, which they are apparently going to do all in one day, from the purchase of the old slaughterhouse to opening night that same night.

While compressing the events of this movie into a single day does not make a lot of logistical sense, it pays huge dividends in terms of the story. Coogler, also the writer, uses the constraints he places on himself for an exquisite economy of storytelling, as we get to understand the brothers and their slightly different personalities as they collect up local friends and acquaintances, many of the grudging variety, from about midday to sundown.

These include their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a preternaturally talented blues musician who goes by the nickname “Preacher Boy” as he is the preacher’s son; Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he had a baby who died in infancy; prospective bouncer Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller); aged blues musician and drunkard Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); Stack’s ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who is constantly fielding unspoken accusations that she is not enough of a percentage Black; and a pair of immigrant Chinese shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), who will make a sign for them on extremely short notice in addition to also working that night.

The extent of Preacher Boy’s preternatural gifts with his guitar and his voice have not yet been fully revealed. We learn in a cold open that there are some musicians in every culture whose skills are so profound that their music can conjure spirts, both from the past and from the future, and a night of illegal alcohol, music and dancing is bound to do just that – as well as attract the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which the man who sold them the building assured them no longer exists.

For a long time, Sinners is a hangout movie, as we delight just in being in the company of Coogler’s extremely well drawn cast of characters. Smoke and Stack’s errands around town are such engrossing bits of side material – side material of what’s to come, we should say – that a whole movie’s worth of them might not be too much. During this we also learn that although calling them big teddy bears would be too much – Stack does leave too small-timers with superficial bullet wounds for messing with his truck – we are also not going to have to suffer through extreme anti-hero behaviour from them.

This section of the film is, of course, building up to the big night on a narrative level, but it’s building up to something even bigger on the level of cinematic creativity. There’s a centrepiece sequence here in which we see the actual power of Preacher Boy’s music, and while it pains us to be so withholding, the exact nature of what makes this sequence, told at the juke joint in one uninterrupted take, is worth withholding. Let’s just say it proves that working in the MCU has not sapped Coogler of his instincts for originality. Just know that if you watch Sinners, there’s a moment about an hour in when your jaw will drop, and gravity will have the better of it for about three minutes.

Having Michael B. Jordan as your star is a boon to any film. His work as the two brothers is not entirely differentiated, which is probably why it’s useful to have that red and blue colour coding for their outfits. Two distinct characters do ultimately emerge, and the technology required to having them appearing in the same shots – not itself as jaw-dropping as it might have once been – is first rate. It’s really the secondary characters who give this film its pulsing sense of life, as Coogler and his casting director have assembled an array of three-dimensional human beings who are usually funny and always deep. Caton and Lindo are particular standouts, though Mosaku and Steinfeld hold the screen impressively.

Then there’s the turn this film takes about midway through, into the territory we can’t talk about if we are trying to bring you into the movie as Coogler would like to bring you in: fresh and without preconceived notions. Let’s just say it definitely works, though Sinners does lose just a small amount of its momentum in its latter stages. That it loses momentum, and still earns close to a perfect score, is a sign of exactly what Coogler has brought to us in his 15-year career.

 

Sinners is currently playing in cinemas.