In December 1969, a tactical unit of the Cook County State Attorney’s Office, the Chicago Police Department and the FBI performed a raid on an apartment in the city. Their target was 21-year-old Fred Hampton, a revolutionary socialist and a Black Panther leader. The FBI had identified him as a threat a few years earlier, and his elimination was part of the FBI’s own focus on erasing Black activists’ attempts to confront the anti-Black inequality and injustice that defined so much of American culture. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first Director, was actively concerned with the racist suppression of Black voices and the assassination of Hampton was part of the bureau’s Counter Intelligence Programme, targeting members of the Black Panther movement in a series of covert projects aimed at discrediting domestic political organisations.
In “Judas and the Black Messiah”, which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival, director and cowriter Shaka King covers the last few years of Hampton’s life as the Chicago unit of the Black Panthers is infiltrated by FBI informant William O’Neal. This version of the story presents it as an infiltration drama. Lakeith Stanfield is O’Neal, the petty criminal who gets roped into the machinations of the FBI as the at-first unsuspecting informant that will ingratiate himself into Daniel Kaluuya’s Hampton, and his inner circle. They are, respectively, the Judas and the Black Messiah of the film’s title, as they orbit each other towards the inevitable conclusion – the betrayal of a saviour and the hollow regret of the betrayer.
There have been various versions of this film in the works since 2014, and it’s easy to understand why. The power of film to spread awareness of history remains key, and this is a work that leaps out from the screen, announcing its significance. It matters that Hampton’s brutal murder, and his preceding years of activism, are given a Hollywood treatment that privileges his blackness and counters the old mythologies of who gets this kind of big-screen adulation. But it’s an account of the story that comes armed, and in some ways burdened, with the knowledge that a Hollywood treatment of someone like Fred Hampton will inevitably feel more sanitised than revolutionary.
There are a number of key scenes where Daniel Kaluuya’s oratory skills are put on display as he gives voice to aspects of Hampton’s dismay at the state of race in America. They are some of his strongest scenes, giving voice to the electricity of Hampton. Even within that recurring motif of oration as thematic illumination, “Judas and the Black Messiah” is stolidly evasive about the specificity of Hampton’s politics. Hampton’s anticapitalistic socialism was central to his ideology, but the script’s perspective of his political ideology is a nebulous version of ‘things are bad’ rather than a reflection of the specific rhetoric that marked his interest. Since the film frames the story as one of competing institutions (the FBI v the Black Panthers), the non-specificity does not upend the momentum and yet it feels like a missed opportunity in engaging with exactly why Hampton poses a threat to the FBI and white America at large. Still, even the sanitised Hampton is incisive enough to nod to the larger socio-political dynamics at play.
Rather than a specific engagement with Hampton’s ideological preoccupations, the screenplay by director Shaka King and Will Berson presents this story as an inverse of familiar narratives like “Donnie Brasco” or “The Departed”. Instead of rooting for the state-sponsored informant, we are increasingly alarmed at the ways the FBI’s handling of O’Neal reveals the power imbalances and racial prejudices of the alleged law-enforcement agencies. Thematically it’s an interesting riff on a familiar genre, and in action it turns “Judas and the Black Messiah” into a film that seems to be wrestling with different iterations of itself.
The film’s title is a perceptive stroke of genius that uses the biblical allusion to set up an excellent parallel between the O’Neal – Hampton relationship. But the film loses a bit of that resonance when so much of it finds the two men separate from each other. The separation does not upend the film. The scenes with the FBI are the least compelling, but they give Lakeith Stanfield the opportunity to play the psychological torment of O’Neal to great effect. As written, O’Neal is not as distinct a character as Hampton. But as performed, Stanfield turns his body into a weapon and a shield as he manifests O’Neal’s anxiety into a performance that uses every part of his body. He moves like a man on the verge of a breakdown.
The separation of Hampton’s Messiah and his betrayer gives the film the closest thing to moments of peace in the scenes where Hampton courts Deborah Johnson, played beautifully by Dominique Fishback. Their early scenes together present vital moments of joy that make Hampton’s eventual assassination even more impactful. And the final, protracted scene between the two men is a beautiful moment of unspoken feelings. But in separating the titular men for so much of its runtime, “Judas and the Black Messiah” robs itself of a chance to juxtapose how two different ideas of black masculinity find themselves at the mercy of white supremacy.
And so, the film is one that subsists on forceful and kinetic moments married with ones that feel schematic. There is an almost metatextual quality to the way it seems to be reeling in so many directions, giving the audience so much to consider even as it remains restlessly unsettled. Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography and Kristian Sprague’s sharp editing capture the frenetic nature of the revolution and present the coldness of the FBI in effective contrast, even when it feels like the film spends too much time in the latter that could be better devoted to exploring the Panthers.
There’s much that’s going on here even amidst the feeling, at the end, that there seems so much more to explore. It’s a paradox that makes sense considering the complex legacy of Hampton. Amidst complications — like the way Kaluuya never reads as 21-years-old, or the way the film never quite engages with O’Neal’s intentions despite Stanfield’s marvelous work — the distinctive point of view of the story, the technical surety and the three central performances feel more important. This is a film that lingers, even when and especially when it seems to be struggling with varying parts of itself. As far Hollywood encounters with history go, “Judas and the Black Messiah” feels like a necessary and rewarding chapter.
Judas and the Black Messiah, which premiered at the just concluded Sundance Film Festival, will be available for streaming on digital platforms later in the month.