I went into Judas & the Black Messiah with high expectations and I gotta say that the film managed to actually exceed those expectations. It’s just a really excellent movie and I loved that the movie takes a different tack from just being a typical biopic. A typical biopic could still have gotten at a lot of the themes the movie explores, but by exploring not just Fred Hampton, but also the young man who betrayed him at the behest of the FBI, the movie really becomes a tragedy about the price of a man’s soul and the emotional weight of the movie is immense.
The performances are, if anything, being underpraised. I’ve been a fan of LaKeith Stanfield for years and I think is his best performance. He brings a lot of layers to his performance as Bill O’Neal and watching him just slowly disintegrate over the course of the movie was a really intense experience. Daniel Kaluuya is as brilliant as he always is as Hampton, able to convey tremendous emotion with something as simple as a flick of the eyes, but unafraid to take his performance to absolutely epic proportions when the moment calls for it. Dominique Fishback was an actress I wasn’t really familiar with prior to this movie, but I have to say, she absolutely owns every scene she’s in as Hampton’s struggling lover. I liked Jesse Plemons’ performance too; vocally, he seems to be doing an early Jack Nicholson, but I liked that the movie also traced a really strong character arc for him as well; he is, in his own way, offered the same dilemma as Stanfield’s O’Neal, but he doesn’t have the struggle O’Neal does when he realizes that he has to give up some of his own ideals in order to progress up the ladder. When that moment comes, he just does it. Martin Sheen gives what I suspect is a pretty divisive performance as J. Edgar Hoover, but I liked it; it isn’t subtle, but it’s J. Edgar Hoover who wasn’t exactly a subtle guy. The film portrays him as quite literally monstrous, repulsive and grotesque, but it worked for me.
I suppose in some way that portrayal of Hoover fits right in with the larger premise of this movie, which really is epic in some ways. Shaka King, and his co-writer Will Berson, frame this story in the context of the story of Christ’s betrayal by Judas; they want this story to be freighted with all the weight and power of that deeply spiritual story. It’s a tall order and I could certainly have foreseen a situation where I would have felt that self-consciously framing the story that way was pretentious and, if you take pretentious in a non-perjorative sense, I suppose it is, but the saving grace here is that it just works. The movie does have that sense of souls in the balance, a moral dilemma that is deeply personal, but also carries resonances that seem to speak to the essential dilemmas of humanity. This movie absolutely knocked me out, pretty well start to finish and the ending just left me sitting there in shock. It’s just another in a long, long line of movies that capture a very specific place, time & incident and, by virtue of that, end up capturing exactly the moment we’re in now. 4 stars.
tl;dr – astoundingly great performances elevate an already excellent script to the stratosphere in this emotionally devastating masterpiece. 4 stars.