Required moments for Black America are few and far between — the release of the original Roots miniseries in 1977; Michael Jackson moonwalking on our television screens in 1983; Barack Obama’s first presidential acceptance speech in 2008; the occasional midnight drop of a new visual Beyoncé album.
Now, there’s a new one: Sinners, a film with which Ryan Coogler has established himself not only as a billion-dollar box-office director, but as a critical auteur. With Sinners, Coogler delivers a stunning, layered tribute to Black people as “Blues People,” invoking the spirit of LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) and his seminal 1963 study Blues People: Negro Music in White America. In Coogler’s hands, blues becomes not just music, but metaphor — mapping Black survival, spirit and sorrow across American apartheid.
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At the center of Sinners are the twin characters, Stack and Smoke, both played with emotional dexterity by Michael B. Jordan, Coogler’s longtime collaborator. Their partnership recalls the great cinematic duos: Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington. Together, Coogler and Jordan have already amassed billions at the box office with the Creed franchise, Black Panther, and Wakanda Forever — but Sinners resonates on a distinct, more transcendent frequency.
For those who remember Fruitvale Station — Coogler and Jordan’s first collaboration — that film echoes the emotional devastation of main character Oscar Grant’s story; it stretches beyond realism into the mythopoetic. If Fruitvale was a sharply rendered portrait of a single Black life lost to police violence, Sinners is a sprawling epic about the blues-infused Black soul itself in the 1930s Jim Crow South.
Sinners is, at its heart, about how Black music — and by extension, Black life — endures, transforms, and regenerates under impossible conditions.
Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther franchise is relevant here as well. One unspoken secret of the world of Wakanda is that the vibranium, which allows this fictional nation to maintain its advanced sovereignty, is a sort of stand-in for the cultural primacy of Black diasporic artistic production. Black art has not quite achieved what Wakanda’s vibranium has, but it is the closest thing to a precious, infinitely powerful resource in real Black life.
The concept of Coogler’s latest film also riffs brilliantly on Jonathan Edwards’ infamous 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Preached during the Great Awakening, Edwards’ fire-and-brimstone rhetoric warned congregants that they dangled precariously over hell’s flames, sustained only by God’s arbitrary mercy. His God was not loving, but wrathful — a judge waiting for sinners to slip.
Coogler flips the script: In Sinners, the characters are not suspended over the fires of hell by an angry Puritan God, but cradled in the complex, often misunderstood hands of a Black God — Papa Legba, the loa of crossroads and communication in West African and Haitian Voodoo traditions.
An unflinching exploration of violence
The mythology surrounding Robert Johnson, the legendary bluesman, tells of a Faustian bargain struck at the crossroads — selling his soul to the devil for extraordinary musical talent. But Coogler’s film, and recent conversations like the one between Coogler and Dr. Jelani Cobb on WNYC, urge us to reconsider this story.
Maybe Johnson wasn’t dealing with the Christian “devil” at all. Maybe he was in dialogue with Papa Legba, a powerful spirit who governs access, opportunity and thresholds. In diasporic cosmologies, Legba is a mediator — not a demon. In the context of Black blues history, to stand at the crossroads is not to fall into evil but to choose destiny, to seize creation in a world designed for Black destruction.
Through Sinners, Coogler restores this spiritual complexity to Black narratives historically distorted by White Christian framing. In his conversation with Cobb, Coogler says as much:
The movie deals with the Faustian deal. I was very obsessed with the ancient. The most notorious Delta blues story is the story of the musician who goes to the crossroads … making a deal with a nefarious, metaphysical character. The Robert Johnson narrative. Now, I did some research, most extensively with Amiri Baraka’s work and also Deep Blues by Robert Palmer. They talk about how sometimes it’s the devil, sometimes it’s Papa Legba.
In this same vein, Coogler’s Sinners also offers an unflinching, nuanced exploration of violence.
In an early scene, Stack shoots two Black men attempting to rob his truck. He wounds but does not kill them, then pays a local grocer to cover their medical bills. Here, violence is transactional — corrective, not annihilative. It reflects the brutal economy of Black-on-Black interactions in survivalist inner-city spaces, where harm can be mitigated even when inflicted.
This is Black grace: complicated, earned, informed by history and hurt. It is not the arbitrary mercy of Jonathan Edwards’ angry Puritan God. It is the hard-won mercy of Papa Legba at the crossroads, where sinners aren’t simply punished but given agency and asked to choose.
Later, when Stack faces off against Klansmen who attempt to steal back land he purchased, the rules change entirely. This time, he shoots to kill — with military precision and righteous fury. No mercy. No reparations.
The contrast is stark: Coogler distinguishes between intraracial harm borne of scarcity and interracial violence born of systemic plunder. In the Jim Crow South of Sinners, Black men must navigate both — and the responses are necessarily different.
It’s a chilling, necessary reminder for contemporary America: Violence is not monolithic. Context matters.
How Black life endures
Sinners is, at its heart, about how Black music — and by extension, Black life — endures, transforms, and regenerates under impossible conditions. One juke joint scene in particular vibrates with transcendent energy, summoning not just the ghosts of blues but the seeds of jazz, R&B, soul, Hip-Hop, and every global genre touched by the cultural power flowing throughout the Black Atlantic.
The spirits swirling in that juke joint are not just entertainment; they are testimonies, living proof that from sorrow, beauty blooms.
As Amiri Baraka and others have argued, Black music is “the most profound expression of the Afro-American experience” — and in Sinners, Ryan Coogler captures that profundity with staggering grace.
Stay through the credits — all of them. Coogler’s post-credit scenes reveal a final, astonishing gesture of mercy — one that reframes the entire film. Without spoiling it fully, Coogler suggests that even amid the justified rage, the cyclical betrayals, and the bloodshed, grace is possible. The sinners in Sinners are in the hands of — at the mercy of, if you will, a complex, merciful Black God.
This is Black grace: complicated, earned, informed by history and hurt. It is not the arbitrary mercy of Jonathan Edwards’ angry Puritan God. It is the hard-won mercy of Papa Legba at the crossroads, where sinners aren’t simply punished but given agency and asked to choose.
Coogler asks us to consider the following: In a world where Black people are branded sinners simply for existing, who holds them? What god watches over them? And when they make existential decisions at the crossroads, what power might they seize?
Sinners is not just a film. It is a sermon and a diasporic symphony, a crossroads at its own cultural crossroads. Ryan Coogler has made his masterpiece. And it surges on a Black wavelength designed to teach, inspire and empower.
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