Judas and the Black Messiah

 

Like the best of "true story" cinema, Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah operates in the past and present. As a dramatized re-telling of the FBI's infiltration of the Black Panther Party in Chicago using a car thief as an informant, the film, which is gripping in its construction and performances, documents J. Edgar Hoover's fixation on suppressing civil rights groups while making oblique references to modern-day protests against police violence.

Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield play, respectively, Chicago Black Panther commander Fred Hampton -- who was killed by city, state and federal agents in a raid on his home in 1969 -- and informant Bill O'Neal, who is depicted as giving crucial intelligence about Panther movement and strategy to field agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who recruited him. Kaluuya and Stanfield present Hampton's energizing oration and O'Neal's agitated duplicity with assurance. They're both captivating.

Kaluuya's performance, with his long speeches and face-offs with rival resistance groups, is the showier piece, and unquestionably deserving of praise, but Stanfield, to me, covers more emotional and psychological ground as a man trapped by his own petty criminality in a scheme that he cannot control. His scenes with Plemons are infused with anxiety and dread.

Hampton was a martyr to the cause of Black empowerment, but O'Neal is also a tragic figure. As presented in King's masterful film, the "betrayer" was collateral damage in a mission he could neither embrace nor would benefit from. O'Neal died in 1990, after running into traffic on a Chicago freeway in the middle of the night and being hit by a car. His death was ruled a suicide.