In the Flesh: Judas and the Black Messiah (Patreon)

“...political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!.” As twenty-one-year-old Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton, Daniel Kaluuya delivers the famous revolutionary’s words with a smooth, fluid ease, an effortless charisma which at times gives way to the gentle earnestness of a boy who learned too young to be a man. “I’m not shy,” he tells his lover Deborah (Dominique Fishback) during their courtship, but he can’t hide the truth. That vulnerability lives deep within him. How could it be otherwise for a man to whom Emmett Till was the neighbor boy his mother watched sometimes? Shaka King’s film is a testament to Hampton, certainly, but more than that it’s a testament to the ideas the government buried along with his young body — ideas like police and prison abolition, universal healthcare, and free meal programs which for years after his death were effectively stricken from popular discussion.

Even when Judas and the Black Messiah is at its warmest and most intimate, the specter of what Hampton’s death meant not just for the Panthers but for the entire black liberation movement hovers at the edges of the frame. “You saying I got capitalist feet?” Deborah asks him when he jokingly insists she warm his cold ones as a socialist act of resource distribution. It’s a charming moment, the chemistry between Kaluuya and Fishback so easy, so natural, that it takes a moment later to realize that it foreshadowed Hampton’s understanding that his body belongs to the people and will, sooner or later, be sacrificed for them. Two generations of black political leadership in America were systematically murdered by police and the FBI to strike at black cohesion and prevent the overthrow of white nationalism and the capitalism which is its public right hand, and King’s movie never lets you forget it. In this respect the casting of America’s favorite curmudgeonly TV president, Martin Sheen, as J. Edgar Hoover, the whitebread monster at the heart of the web of white complacency and carceral coercion which draws tight around Hampton as the movie reaches its climax, is a stroke of genius.

Perhaps the film’s single strongest supporting element, beyond Kaluuya’s once in a decade performance and LaKeith Stanfield’s incredible turn as the haunted, empty FBI informant Bill O’Neal, is King’s attention to crowds and background action. Pay attention to any given scene and you’ll be rewarded with a complex tableau of expressions and body language, as when a clearly reluctant and upset police officer nonetheless participates willingly in the trumped-up and brutal arrests of black radicals, his inner conflict as plain as the emotions of any central figure in one of King’s thoughtfully composed and lively shots. The active nature of the camera is a thrill and a joy, as when it slides nervously through an industrial yard practically cheek-to-cheek with a frightened police officer (this movie is the most refreshingly and bluntly “kill all cops” thing I’ve seen in years), so close and tense that his outstretched arm appears elongated, the gun it holds dwarfed by his panic. This more than anything is what King excels at as a filmmaker: forcing you to crouch and crawl and breathe side by side with the human beings racing madly through this pivotal and tragic moment in American history.