There’s a tricky balance involved in writing and creating a biographical film to examine the specific conditions of a specific culture in a specific time period; are you true to the context of the history at that time, or do you shape the events of that time to draw parallels to the present day? Many admirable historical figures ended up representing some profoundly troubling movements toward imperialism, colonialism, religious exclusivity, racism and political nationalism, and are rightfully being reassessed, while other iconoclasts and confrontational figures turn out to be genuinely uplifting heralds of more practical, moral and equitable ideas, and their previously pejorative place in history Is being corrected. The idea, the truth, that the United States is, and has been, institutionally racist throughout its history has slowly infiltrated the American consciousness since the 1950s, but, here, in 2021, there’s a damned-near indisputable argument that it’s not happening nearly quickly enough.
Through the fifties and sixties, Fred Hampton watched the predominantly white executive, legislative and judicial establishments of the city, state and country he lived in fail to protect, or make real efforts to improve, the quality of life for African-American communities in Chicago and the rest of the country. Of course, you could say the same for Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King or, literally, hundreds upon hundreds of others who have had their lives taken over the cause of civil rights. Formed in Oakland in 1966, The Black Panther Party arranged for armed patrols to protect Black neighborhoods from police abuses, later establishing free breakfast and educational programs for children, and health clinics catering to the specific health needs of the impoverished black community. In 1968, having already done extensive work with the NAACP’s Youth Council, Fred Hampton joined with Bob Brown to become deputy chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, and set himself to the same ambitious agenda. He was 20 years old.
And so begins Shaka King’s Judas And The Black Messiah (USA, 2021), a chronicle of how the true purposes of the Black Panther Party, and the motivations of its inspirational leader in Chicago, were distorted and betrayed by at least one American institution of that time, the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover went after the Black Panther Party with the same virulent zeal with which he had attacked communists in the fifties and scuttled KKK prosecutions in the sixties. One of his agent/emissaries, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), recruits William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a poor but clever small-time crook and car thief, to join the Black Panthers, ingratiate himself with Hampton, and report back on the true activities of Hampton and his organization from deep inside. Stanfield is excellent as the conflicted but ultimately self-serving O’Neal, who is sincerely inspired by the movement, his own work within it, and his regard for Fred Hampton, but inevitably keeps the long view for himself and whatever he can get from Agent Mitchell.
Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), on the other hand, is the real deal, with rock-solid conviction and the ability to communicate it to a broad variety of other people. We first meet him at the opening of the newly-opened west-side Malcolm X College, and he gives a typically incendiary but measured speech about white institutions patronizing black strivers by, for instance, renaming colleges without providing actual escalating opportunities. But he’s also approached by an admirer, Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), who both chides him for his dismissal of blacks who may not agree with him, and compliments him on his naturally poetic verbal instincts. She starts working at the Panther office at 2350 W. Madison, and she and Fred start their romance. When Fred is sent to prison on a ludicrous conviction for stealing ice cream, Deborah carries on in the meantime in the face of the BPP headquarters being ravaged and firebombed by the Chicago Police, and, unbeknownst to Fred, her pregnancy with their baby son. Despite these setbacks, Hampton became a powerfully constructive figure in Chicago, creating The Rainbow Coalition to bring white, Latinos and blacks, street gangs and white supremacists, together to start addressing economic and sociopolitical inequities common to all of them. Hampton was proving that the cynics, the politicians, law-enforcement and the capitalists weren’t as powerful as they seemed. It’s no wonder he was seen as a threat to entrenched interests.
It’s pretty amazing how this story was diminished throughout the seventies – it was, after all, a government-sponsored criminal conspiracy to commit a series of murders, culminating with Hampton’s. As a white kid growing up in Chicago’s white western suburbs at the time, our general impression was that the violence was a shame, and concerning, but Chicago’s black community was full of troublemakers, and only so much of that was our business. Which is exactly what Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Chicago Police, the FBI and the Nixon administration wanted most (white) people to think.
Director Shaka King, surprisingly, wrote the script with three comedy writers: Will Berson, who worked on Arrested Development and Scrubs a few years back, and Keith and Kenneth Lucas, an identical-twin-brother comedy team who debuted on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, created the animated Lucas Bros. Moving Co. for the FX network, and had their comedy special Lucas Brothers: On Drugs picked up on Netflix. But they had also nurtured their own screenwritten version of this story since 2010. Clearly talented writers all, the screenplay has a terrific balance of urgency and gravity without falling into overly reverential or confrontational melodrama. Judas And The Black Messiah is a great title for the film, but the writers themselves tend to stay away from that kind of metaphorical grandiosity, to their credit.
King’s film looks great as well, thanks to cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who’s worked with British filmmaker Steve McQueen (he shot 12 Years A Slave, among others), and recently did Dominic Cooke’s The Courier and Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section. Bobbitt’s interiors and large group compositions are quite good, but his nighttime urban exterior work is gorgeous, and lends a nice noir undercurrent to the other action. (Cleveland stands in for Chicago here, but you’d barely know it.) And Craig Harris and Mark Isham’s musical score is one of the best I’ve heard this year.
The film’s a bit stretched out – there’s a fantastic 90-minute movie here, but the film runs a touch past two hours, and the pacing and narrative get a bit garbled in the last third. And Shaka King and his associates clearly chose acting chops over verisimilitude – Kaluuya and Stanfield are each ten years too old for the true characters. But this is a very good movie nonetheless, created by filmmakers who took a big leap of ambition (with a lot of acknowledged credit to producer Ryan Coogler) and nailed the landing. 5 of the eight Best Picture nominations are legitimately good, and this is one of them. It’s also nominated for Best Actor (Kaluuya), Supporting Actor (Stanfield), Cinematography (Babbitt) and Original Screenplay. I’d be very surprised if Judas And The Black Messiah went empty-handed on Sunday night.
Further instructive reading:
Fred Hampton Was a Black Panther Activist Murdered By the FBI. It Could Happen Again. (yahoo.com)
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