Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield offer a combined pair of phenomenal performances in “Judas and the Black Messiah”. Kaluuya is Fred Hampton, the controversial president of the Illinois Black Panthers Party in the late 1960s, and Stanfield is Bill O’Neal, the FBI informant who contributed to Hampton’s murder. The film, directed by Shaka King from a script he wrote with Will Berson, is a special type of duo – a powerful and downright likeable political biography with contemporary relevance and a morality tale presented as an exciting action adventure. (The film is being shown in theaters and broadcast on HBO Max.)
It is impossible to say which of the two characters is dominant. Hampton is prodigiously energetic, violent from time to time and formidably persuasive, a talented speaker who speaks at the speed of an auctioneer – I will not pretend that I have always been able to follow – and moves his audience with accusations of racial injustice and promises of progress through revolutionary action. Hampton was notably 21 years old when he died after a pre-dawn armed attack in his apartment. Kaluuya is not 21 years old and is English, not American, a cause for concern in some circles. However, the sheer brilliance of his portrait sweeps all issues, except how in the world he set up such a performance. (We see Hampton listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, not only for his content, but for his masterful cadences. We are told that Mr. Kaluuya, in turn, worked with an opera coach as part of his preparation for the initial role dialogue.)
The play’s Judas, O’Neal, died in 1990; his death was considered suicide. In the interpretation of the film, O’Neal is politically a donkey, before and well after meeting Hampton, serving him as security captain of the Black Panthers and betraying him. A career car thief before infiltrating the Panthers, he had a predilection, actually substantiated, for impersonating an FBI agent and then appropriating the car keys of suspected suspects. (In one of the film’s many exciting moments, some of Hampton’s lieutenants test O’Neal’s veracity, making him prove he can call a car directly.)
Mr. Stanfield’s silent triumph – you won’t understand stillness until you see it – is to make O’Neal moving, even fascinating, as well as unprincipled and despicable. He is a melancholy rat, imprisoned for his alliance with the FBI. You can almost see the workings of his mind as he frantically tries to understand the magnitude of what he signed. He does not have the privilege and education of Clerici, the fascist killer in Bernardo Bertolucci’s incomparable “The Conformist”, but the two men share a spiritual void that cannot be filled.
The production involves its two stars with splendid actors in smaller roles. Jesse Plemons is Roy Mitchell, O’Neal’s manipulator in the FBI, a pleasant and perfectly comfortable man in putting evil actions in motion. (The film is relentless in its depiction of a lawless FBI.) Martin Sheen is unrecognizable and frightening, like J. Edgar Hoover, famous for fearing the rise of a black messiah and obsessed with Hampton as the candidate in question. Dominique Fishback plays Deborah Johnson, Hampton’s girlfriend. Mrs. Fishback is attractive in a conventional way, until she becomes absolutely charming in a breathtaking scene that lasts almost three minutes. It is when Deborah, pregnant with Hampton’s son, defends her case, with eloquence equal to his, that life should be more than an incessant war in the name of social justice.