Just finished watching Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to check it out earlier. As with so many movies and books in my various queues, there was always something more urgent to watch, but the spur for me to watch it now was the fact that it's set to disappear from HBO Max at the end of September.
The first thing to say is that the movie is stuffed with magnetic performances. Daniel Kaluuya is the most obvious one, playing Chairman Fred Hampton, but LaKeith Stanfield does a great job as Bill O'Neal and so does Jesse Plemons as FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Kaluuya and Stanfield have rightly been recognized for their performances, but I was struck by Plemons in this, how he's clearly evil but also, to an extent, conflicted by what he's meant to be doing.
What I liked about his performance was contrasting it with his roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, which are clear opposites to one another, while in this film he's somewhere between the boy in Friday Night Lights and the sociopath in Breaking Bad - he has things he cares about, and isn't even completely unsympathetic to what he's asking of Bill O'Neal, but he's quick to harden his heart and do what his superiors order (with Martin Sheen playing a gross and sinister J. Edgar Hoover, making a nice change from Jed Bartlet).
Of course, it's perverse to write about Judas and the Black Messiah and only single out the white dude for praise, so let's be clear that Daniel Kaluuya is amazing. His speeches suck you in from the first scene, and the speech he gives when he gets out of jail was especially electrifying. Beyond that, I loved his relationships with Deborah, Bill, even the other gangs that he enlists into the Rainbow Coalition.
As far as the history, it's an era that I know so little about, even though the Black Panthers were founded just across the Bay in Oakland. That said, it's not surprising that a group that couched the racial liberation struggle in Marxist/Maoist terms would be hard for American culture to understand. But it was fascinating to see the organizing that they did, in addition to their more proactive methods of countering police brutality. It makes me want to find out more about them, because a cursory search on their Wikipedia page just now shows that there was a lot to the original organization, good and bad.
One thing that the movie elided but that I thought would have been interesting to raise was that Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton put together. He's depicted pulling together other Black gangs in Chicago, as well as Puerto Ricans and the Young Patriots, which look like a white supremacist movement, mostly because they're all shown to be southern whites and they're standing in front of a Confederate flag. It turns out that they were a far-left movement that also advocated class struggle, but aimed at poor whites from the South.
Knowing that, it makes more sense that Fred Hampton would have been able to bring them into his movement, but it would have been nice to see it spelled out better. The fact that there was a revolutionary group aimed at poor whites is a pretty eye-opening idea, since the portrayal of them on film usually seems to lean on the racism.
Of course, part of my problem is that my understanding of the 60s is mediated almost exclusively through Star Trek, Spiderman, music (Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel especially) and repeated viewings of Forrest Gump when I was in school. The latter, in particular, does a nice job of transmitting the atmosphere of the 60s, but doesn't go very deep, and none of those sources can encompass the wide sweep of everything that was happening then. So we end up with cartoonish portrayals of the Black Panthers or other movements of the era, without understanding what they were actually about.
That's why I liked this movie so much: it goes into a topic that I feel I ought to know more about, anchoring it around a fascinating personality in the form of Fred Hampton. And by showing us what was happening in the 60s, it lets us draw a comparison with how race relations are going now, showing how despite certain markers of progress, there are still the same power structures in place that led to Hampton's assassination.
As I mentioned, Judas and the Black Messiah is streaming on HBO Max through the end of September. I'd have liked to watch it earlier, but I'm glad I caught it now.
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