Sinners.

Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return from a few years in Chicago working for Al Capone to their hometown in rural Mississippi, where they plan to open a juke joint for their fellow Black Mississippians, with booze, gambling, and good old-fashioned Delta blues. It’s all good, profitable fun, at least until the white vampires show up, and the whole show turns into a battle royale.

Sinners, the latest film from director and writer Ryan Coogler, is that story – but a whole lot more, with layers upon layers of meaning below the surface of a film that starts out as a celebration and ends up a horror film, although it plays with the tropes of all of its genres. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but with some strong performances and incredible music, it’s an unusually good time at the theater among the sequels and the IP- and merchandise-driven pablum.

Michael B. Jordan stars as Smoke and Stack, oozing charm and panache, although the two characters are largely indistinguishable beyond their attire. They come home and buy a decrepit mill from the obviously racist (Boss) Hogwood, planning to turn it into their new juke joint. They ask their young cousin Sammy, also known as Preacher Boy (perhaps a nod to Samuel Sharpe?), to come play his guitar at opening night, only to discover that he’s become an exceptional blues guitarist with a deep, powerful voice – so powerful, in fact, that it calls out to the devil himself in the form of Remmick, an Irish immigrant and vampire who has already infected a married couple who are Klan members and who are more than happy to join him in an attempt to invade the joint and turn everyone inside.

There’s so much story here that that alone would make it one of the most interesting American films of the last five years; so many movies work with less plot and equivalent run times, yet Sinners seems to abound with story and subplot, to the point that crucial characters, including Stack’s white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, in her first significant film role since 2018) and Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), get a fraction of the back story they deserve. There are multiple movies’ worth of material and strong characters here, and Coogler knows it, playing with genre and tropes, starting the film out as a glorious celebration of Black culture and music, then turning very hard into a neo-horror film with revenge-fantasy elements that pits its white vampires against the Black heroes, literally surrounding them and threatening to burn the place down.

You can watch Sinners as is, without even considering the subtext beyond the obvious racial stuff – one of the film’s few moments of outright humor is when the vampires start talking about their belief in racial equity, and act offended that they’re not invited into the club because they’re white – but there appear to be layers upon layers of meaning below the surface. My first thought as the film ended was that the entire story might be a metaphor for the Tulsa Race Massacre, a real-life atrocity where Black residents of Tulsa built businesses that were profitable and part of the community, and white supremacists burned it all down and murdered dozens of Black Tulsans. But it could apply to all of Black history in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery, right up to our modern moment of a white minority seizing power to reverse decades of gains in civil rights. The blood-suckers aren’t just coming for the Black lives in that juke joint, but to feed off of the culture inside it, to profit from Black music and dance and traditions and leave the Black progenitors poor, wounded, or dead.

Jordan is going to earn much of the praise for his twin performances here, and he’s very good, but the two characters aren’t distinguished by much beyond their clothes; there are some references early in the film that imply that one of them is the more responsible of the two, the better business mind. The story just doesn’t do much with this, and the main distinction between them becomes their women, not anything innate to their characters. Steinfeld and Mosaku are tremendous in their supporting roles, as is Delroy Lindo as the drunk harmonica player who just wants to be paid in beer but ends up a voice of wisdom when calamity strikes. Sammy is played by a newcomer, Miles Caton, who boasts an outstanding, deep singing voice and apparently learned to play a mean blues guitar in just two months, and who delivers in what turns out to be the movie’s most pivotal role.

Sinners is overly ambitious in the end; as much action as there is, by the time it hit the two-hour mark I was ready for the conclusion – which it sort of telegraphed in the opening scene, a gimmick many filmmakers use that I really don’t care for at all. Let the ending surprise me, or at least let me come to it on my own terms. The largest action scene is very hard to follow between all of the very fake blood spurting everywhere (vampires, you know) and the dim lighting; I missed the fate of one of the characters entirely in the melee because I just couldn’t see. There’s also a mid-credits scene that I would say only sort of works – it’s sentimental where the rest of the film is anything but, yet it’s also true to some of the broader themes of the story.

This one is going to show up in all of the awards talk later this year, as it was a resounding commercial success, hits on a lot of themes that the voters seem to love, and was made by an acclaimed director who only has two tangential Oscar nominations to date – one for producing Judas & the Black Messiah, the other for the original song from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I would be very surprised if we get to January and it’s not nominated for Best Picture, with a smattering of other nods, definitely for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, maybe for Coogler’s directing or Jordan for playing two parts. Regardless, it’s the kind of movie that I love to see succeeding, because there’s at least some small chance that future projects like this, untethered to any IP or previous films, have a little more chance to secure funding. I liked Sinners a lot, but I doubt it’ll be my favorite movie of the year; that said, if it wins all the things, I won’t be upset in the least.