Michael B. Jordan’s imperfect masterpiece Sinners has a secret in its songs

Despite its current stunning critical reception, Sinners is not perfect. The Ryan Coogler-directed, Michael B. Jordan-acted, action-musical-vampire-romance flick is perhaps a bit over-ambitious in trying to tackle its final genre: social satire and critique. 

But even for its small faults, it is also something else: in short, an incredible, best-of-the-year achievement.

Its unique genre-melting pot follows the Smoke/Stack twins (their combined title derived from both of their nicknames), both played by Jordan. 

The World War I vets-turned-Al Capone gunrunners are back in their hometown of Clarksdale, Miss., after robbing both of Chicago’s Irish and Italian mobs. Instead of hiding out, the twins have a plan: Buy an old mill from a local (likely) Klan member, convert it to the swingingest juke joint around, and serve all the Irish beer and Italian wine they’ve nabbed for a hefty profit. 

WATCH | Sinners trailer: 

Their only problems? Their wayward cousin for one, Sammie (Miles Caton) — better at playing the blues than minding his testy father, the local priest who wants to get rid of their sinful ways. And Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a love interest whom Stack left behind to protect from the dangerous realities of being seen as Black in the South.

Or worst of all, the fact that the local sharecroppers can only pay in wooden nickels instead of real money, all but guaranteeing their dream of living by their own means will always remain a distant fantasy in a society designed to keep them down. 

Oh yeah, and the drooling vampires singing outside.

A lofty goal

Transplanting the always appetizing cinematic cryptid of vampires to the Jim Crow-era South, Sinners sets a demanding goal for itself. Can a horror movie work as a deeply referential essay on the echoing effects of racism, inflicted on one group, which in turn wields it on another?

Can you filter that through the interwoven stories of Irish, Indigenous and Black people competing for land, liberty and respect — both with America’s white majority, and amongst themselves?

Can all that be communicated through the metaphor of blues, Celtic and bluegrass music — each with central importance to a people’s identity, and each appropriated, remixed and stolen? 

And most importantly, can you make it rip?

There is so much to admire in what Coogler, Jordan and Jack O’Connell — playing our delightfully terrifying vampire villain, Remmick — accomplish here. There’s the electricity of a caulked-together Frankengenre, building into something incredibly special, but most importantly, there’s Coogler’s success in using music to hammer his point home.

It’s evident throughout the musical-if-you-squint production. But Sinners‘ moral shines brightest when Remmick’s vampire crew steps to the mic. 

We first hear them sing at the front door of the Black club. Whipping out their instruments, they croon a bluegrass rendition of Pick Poor Robin Clean. 

Their ultimate plan is never fully explained, but has to do with Sammie’s otherworldly musical talent. As explained in a brief introductory voiceover, some musicians are so talented their songs can “pierce the veil between life and death.” Remmick plans on killing all the patrons, grabbing Sammie and using that power for an unspecified nefarious purpose.

Defeats and failures

But first, they need to barter for entry. Hence the song, whose original lyrics — made famous by Geeshie Wiley and L.V. (Elvie) Thomas’s 1930 recording — are on their surface about eating a robin to the bones, but include darker references: “I’m a n—r, don’t cut no figure,” and “I’m a hustlin’ coon, that’s just what I am.” As historian Paul Oliver contextualized in his book Songsters and Saints, many Black people at the time viewed the song as a sort of gallows humour resignation to the economic and racist pressures pushing them into the ground.

In the movie, the vampire crew’s cutesy version gets a begrudging approval from Smoke and Stack, a hidden comment on their doomed situation. 

The song’s self-flagellating lines were popular enough even to reach writer Ralph Ellison. 

“The tune was inevitably productive of laughter — even when we ourselves were its object,” Ellison wrote. “For each of us recognized that [Robin’s] fate was somehow our own. Our defeats and failures — even our final defeat by death — were loaded upon his back and given ironic significance, thus made more bearable.”

But when Remmick’s crew — made up of an Irishman and two newly inducted Ku Klux Klan members — sings the song, it’s to mock the Black bar goers’ doomed attempts at freedom.

The refrain comes up again shortly after, when the coven waits outside, singing to themselves as Mary walks up. The song they pick then is Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go, a relatively modern Irish-Scottish folk song first recorded in 1957.

While the original was a pastoral celebration, the modern version adds an oddly heartless line: “If my true love she were gone/I will surely find another.” As Irish musician Patricia Killeen wrote, it’s unlike virtually all other Irish folk music. But it falls squarely within what’s happening onscreen.

Once bitten, Coogler’s vampires effectively lose their identities: They join a collective hivemind with Remmick. But even as they lose themselves, they keep their own memories. That leads them to try and convince their loved ones to let themselves be bitten. Because for them, maybe selling their souls for immortality — and, most importantly, power — is an enviable escape from the actual evil in their lives.

The message is compounded by Remmick, sitting in the background plucking the banjo. He later laments the men who forced Christianity onto him and his own people centuries ago, before visiting similar violence against the Black bar-goers, echoing the real-life racial tensions between America’s oppressed Irish and Black populations. It’s a monologue delivered by an actor who, though born in England, has explained that he does not identify as British, but is proud of his Irish roots via his father.

Blues as a religion

This isn’t even grappling with the monologue given to Sammie by Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), identifying blues — brought from Africa to America aboard slave ships — as a sort of religion, separate from the Christianity forced upon them when they arrived. 

It’s a bold, if potentially inflammatory statement: Coogler calls out a religion partially used to justify more than 400 years of slavery in the United States, against a people who so universally adopted it that there is now little more a lonely identity than the Black atheist.

It is also calling out the appropriation of Black music, borrowed from and exploited to the point that the genres it helped birth (including country) would come to be associated with anti-Blackness. In that monologue, and Coogler’s choices on songs and who sings them, Sinners connects its vampires squarely to that idea, and the potentially damning cost of rebelling against it.

Despite the almost endless messages on offer, Sinners‘ stumbling blocks also lie in its depth. Once that lush and (literally) barn-burning party scene already advertised in a slew of promotional materials hits, the film’s resolution doesn’t fully commit to unpacking the thesis introduced there.

And instead of really upping the ante, the off-the-wall insertion of vampires is dealt with almost as soon as it’s introduced — perhaps exposing Coogler’s relative rustiness when it comes to writing.

But these are minor complaints to an otherwise impressive success. When it comes to potential success at the box office, you can only hope Coogler hasn’t asked audiences to bite off more than they can chew.