Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ on HBO Max, a Historical Drama Brought to Life by Daniel Kaluuya

Judas and the Black Messiah is another of Warner Bros.’ simultaneous theatrical/streaming releases with a one-month HBO Max expiration date — and beyond that, a somewhat probable Oscar contender. Backed by the clout of producer Ryan Coogler, Shaka King directs this historical drama about the final days of Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, a charismatic firebrand who was killed by police and the FBI during a 1969 raid of his apartment. Hampton’s played by Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther, Queen and Slim), co-starring with Lakeith Stanfield, playing the FBI informant who got him killed.

JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Bill O’Neal (Stanfield) had quite the criminal M.O.: Flash a fake FBI badge, accuse someone of car theft, then “confiscate” the automobile for himself. It worked for a bit, but he gets busted. Impersonating an officer will net you five years. FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) poses a question. “How did you feel when Dr. King was murdered?” he asks. O’Neal’s answer is vague, ambivalent, which apparently makes him a good candidate to spy on the Black Panther Party, specifically Fred Hampton (Kaluuya). It’d also help him avoid prison. He agrees.

Cut to Hampton, orating with the passionate conviction of a gifted preacher, except he’s stumping not for peace, but justice, violent if necessary. Also socialism; he organizes free breakfast for thousands of children, who gather to eat and maybe learn a thing or two about the plight of Black people in America. O’Neal attends an introductory BPP “class,” and when he doesn’t know his history, Hampton makes him do push-ups. Soon enough, O’Neal’s privy to the inner workings of the growing, heavily armed party. He drives Hampton around Chicago as he attempts to unite the Black Panthers with street gangs and other underground ethnic orgs, pointing them towards social justice, specifically, against the increasingly brutal, racist police force.

Problem is, O’Neal is working for a different brutal, racist force. When he expresses some doubt about the FBI’s motives, Agent Mitchell says the BPP is just like the KKK, just on the opposite end of things, and if your False Equivalence-o-Meter is going off, well, it ain’t broken. Notably, Mitchell and his superior have a direct line to infamous power-abuser and racist sack-o’-jowls J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, under heavy prosthetics), who we see in a scene or three flinging heavily spittled anti-Black rhetoric. The FBI plays some dirty, dirty pool, sowing discord and crassly manipulating O’Neal like the man with no options that he is. Hampton connects with a young poet, Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), gets tossed in jail on a bullshit charge, lights up rooms by getting people to chant along with him, “Kill a pig, get a little satisfaction.” The tension between the authorities and Hampton intensifies, and it’s only a matter of time until O’Neal finds himself at the fulcrum of the conflict.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It has some easy parallels with J. Edgar and The Trial of the Chicago 7, but at heart, it’s more of a subterfuge thriller along the lines of The Departed.

Performance Worth Watching: I will watch anything with Daniel Kaluuya in it, just because Daniel Kaluuya is in it.

Memorable Dialogue: O’Neal responds to why he used a fake badge instead of a gun: “A badge is scarier than a gun. Any (n-word) on the street can get a gun.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: King’s direction is extraordinary. It swings uneasy like Black Saint and the Sinner Lady during long, tense takes; he cuts up the film’s conventional historical drama with suspenseful, Michael Mann-esque action-thriller sequences; he follows Hampton up a staircase to a packed room of cheering followers and frames the man as a martyr in waiting. He also knows how to nurture and corral a big performance like Kaluuya’s, which shows soul beneath the omnipresent oratory.

The visual dynamics and committed acting are very much the stuff of good films, the type that court awards-season deliberation. And while the screenplay — written by King and three collaborators — neatly shows complicated shades of morality in its depictions of Hampton, O’Neal, Mitchell and Hoover, it renders them slightly more representational than fully formed characters. The true substance of O’Neal’s character remains muddy, and we get only the slightest sense of his inner turmoil and convictions; even Mitchell, portrayed with typically Plemonsesque yucky white-privilege vibes, gets more opportunities to consider his ideologies, and in his case, while seated at the big, heavy desk of a one-dimensional grotesque villain in Hoover. Kaluuya’s dialogue tends to be speech-heavy, which tends to nudge us away from a better understanding of the man beneath the iconic figure, and Hampton’s relationship with Johnson is sweet and tender, but underdeveloped.

But Judas and the Black Messiah’s faults don’t detract from its relevance, in light of America’s modern dilemmas — which sadly seem like, and very much probably are, the same dilemmas of a half-century ago. File it among the many relatively recent solid-to-exceptional films that capture the turmoil of the late ’60s, including Detroit, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and One Night in Miami. King clearly aims to further immortalize Hampton, who only lived to be 21; although the film misses an opportunity to help us better understand what made him tick beyond the base rage of watching his fellow Black people be unfairly brutalized, we still walk away from it believing that his Black life truly mattered.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Judas and the Black Messiah is a solid drama, very good but not great. It could’ve been rousing, vital, high-temperature, but instead, it’s just perfectly, acceptably warm.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max