Judas And The Black Messiah

From the murder of George Floyd to the storming of the Capitol in the real world, and Da 5 Bloods on streaming cinema it has been quite a year for American race relations which now echoes around the world. It’s also been a year of people coming together and insisting that they be heard. We’re hearing it now, we’re hearing it every day. But this film, about a Black Panther leader in Illinois in the late 1960s, reminds us that the struggle has deep roots in American history—the Sixties almost like ancient history.

The Black Messiah is the Black Panther organiser, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), and the Judas is Bill O’Neill (LaKeith Stanfield), the young black man who is arrested for stealing a car and offered an alternative to jail: work with FBI agent Roy Mitchel (Jesse Plemons). This is set against the moral panic that was used to try and undermine the civil rights movement. On the one hand there was the peaceful yearning for self-determination, but there was also terrible violence. The government connected the Black Panthers not just to violence but to Communism whilst, as in Da 5 Bloods, black men with few rights at home were drafted into the military to go and fight in Vietnam.

This isn’t a wide-open political juggernaut like the work of Spike Lee on Malcolm X and Oliver Stone’s JFK and Nixon. It is more like Parkland and Bobby: focusing on the personal relationships and the people around the title characters. Hampton is a figurehead around the movement, and goes to prison for theft at one point. O’Neill is a confused figure: the man who stands beside the person he is betraying and convincingly demonstrates that he is a part of the movement. When you see the film or if you read more about what happened, this becomes very clear. 

As usual the argument is about the extent of the actions that should be taken against an oppressive system. And revolutionary movements aren’t created by individual people, but by the conditions in which marginalised groups are forced to live. Renaming a college for Malcolm X is not going to stop police brutalising black people. At the same time, demonising Communists overseas whilst worrying that they’re going to emerge from under the beds of white Americans hasn’t achieved much, and the fantastic election of a man of peace from grassroots Chicago politics gave the sensible world a breath of relief but resulted in a swing to the right. It is worth noting that the Black Lives Matter protests were met with almost military force whereas the attack of angry right wing people on the Capitol was almost a walkover, and as close to a coup as we’ve ever been in the United States. This is the emotional heft of the piece: it’s talking about historical figures—flawed people, maybe, and certainly very young and very motivated. They were treated violently, they responded violently, and their own violence was used to scare people into fearing that very same violence. The cycle is depressing, and it’s understood that there were far-Left elements among the Black Panthers but somehow that seems less important now.

Daniel Kaluuya is incredibly good in a powerful role: he handles the big speeches but is also the man behind the figure. J. Edgar Hoover is portrayed by Martin Sheen. Martin Sheen is known to be in every way unlike J. Edgar Hoover, and under a load of prosthetics that do a lot of work you get the distinctive Sheen voice spouting the words of a truly awful man.

This is a great film with an interesting brassy score, and it is generating some Awards interest in a year where the Awards are difficult to get excited about. Daniel Kaluuya is British though—and you wouldn’t know it from his performance!