The morals of “Sinners”, a fantasia of vampires and the blues

A genre is a shorthand way to describe a story or a song. But as well as a category, it can be a judgment: a tool to elevate some kinds of art and denigrate others. Often the judgment extends beyond the work to the people who make or appreciate it, typecasting or marginalising them by disposition (science fiction is for nerds) or by sex (romance novels are girly). Or by race.

“Sinners”, a box-office smash that has conquered the internet, is a work of multiplicity. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, it has several endings—sit through the credits if you want to catch them all—and two lead characters, identical twins known as Smoke and Stack. Both are played by Michael B. Jordan (pictured), who lights his double’s cigarette, fights him and cradles him in his arms. Meanwhile the rollicking film slides between numerous screen genres. Indeed the idea of genre, its uses and abuses, may be its deepest theme.

Mr Coogler’s previous titles include “Creed”, a well-received “Rocky” spin-off, and the hit “Black Panther” films. His latest unfolds over 24 hours in 1932. Having fought in the first world war and hustled for Al Capone in Chicago, Smoke and Stack come home to Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta. The pair of dandyish toughs buy an old sawmill and hastily convert it into a juke joint. The headline act on opening night is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), an aspiring bluesman nicknamed Preacher Boy on account of his godly father.

So far, so historical drama-ish. The story alludes to the toils and traumas of the segregated South, such as sharecropping, chain gangs and lynching. The landscape is bloodstained, figuratively and, on the barn’s floorboards, literally. (The Ku Klux Klan features as well, in a sequence in which “Sinners” morphs briefly into an action flick.)

Genre-wise, however, it is only warming up. The setting is a clue to a zany swerve: Clarksdale is where, meeting the devil at a crossroads, the bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have traded his soul for his talent. Here the fiends are vampires, who besiege the juke joint and chomp the necks of its patrons. “Sinners” thus joins recent books and productions—such as “The Trees” by Percival Everett and the TV series “Lovecraft Country”—that use the supernatural to suggest the grotesqueries of America’s racial past. This is a strand of history that some politicians want to scrub from curriculums, museums and ultimately memory. They are failing.

So “Sinners” is part gangsterish period drama, part vampire horror, with a grenade’s-worth of action movie thrown in. But it is a musical too. A bravura medley of cinema genres that are typically kept apart, it is also a riff on the musical sort.

The film is a homage to the Delta blues, a monumental art form forged in grinding adversity. In a bold fantasia in its middle stretch, Sammie’s performance at the juke joint conjures up the spirits of the antecedents of the blues, and of its progeny, among them West African dancers and a DJ. Sammie’s music is a triumph, yet it is imperilled. His preacher father disapproves of it. Then there are the vampires.

They are musicians themselves; their taste is Irish folk. But they covet the blues. “I want your stories and I want your songs,” their leader growls. The vampires are predatory and appropriative, just as other, predominantly white styles of music, from rock‘n’roll to country, preyed on the blues, profiting from its rhythms and chords. “White folks, they like the blues just fine,” a character says. “They just don’t like the people who make it.” Succumbing to the bloodsuckers means compromise and loss.

Still, a bite from the vampires has an upside—a nuance that helps make Mr Coogler’s wild movie a profound one. It isn’t just that you might live for ever. In a film with a keen interest in who pays whom and how much, the vampires have gold. Above all, they offer a seductive musical camaraderie; join their coven, and you slip off the constraints of genre.

Genres are a way to see the world and respond to it. Each has a canon, conventions and dignity—in “Sinners”, especially the blues. But genres are also simplifications. After all, it may take more than one screen formula and mood to evoke a person’s story, let alone a country’s. And they can be divisive, splitting up art forms that are as much alike as distinct, and splitting up people with them.

Stack’s old flame (Hailee Steinfeld) is a mixed-race woman named Mary who passes as white. “What are you?” asks Sammie, trying to pin her down. “I’m a human being,” Mary tells him.