Judas and the Black Messiah

Fred Hamp­ton was 21 when the FBI mur­dered him. He had been betrayed by William O’Neal, an FBI infor­mant who spent the final year of Fred’s life infil­trat­ing his inner cir­cle. Sha­ka King’s auda­cious biopic imag­ines this episode as both a neo-noir thriller and a para­ble of bib­li­cal tragedy.

The dual roles of Judas and Mes­si­ah are assigned to LaKei­th Stan­field and Daniel Kalu­uya, who embody these arche­types in career-defin­ing per­for­mances. The jut­ting angles of Stanfield’s face around his large, sor­row­ful eyes, as well as his long, lean limbs, evoke a haunt­ed, con­flict­ed, jit­tery ener­gy unlike any­thing we’ve seen from him before. At times, he seems to trans­form into a lit­er­al ser­pent, slith­er­ing out of con­flict with nar­row hips encased in shiny leather.

Hamp­ton was a man of rare charis­ma and strength who gal­vanised and unit­ed dis­parate and dis­pos­sessed peo­ple to fight togeth­er against pover­ty, cor­rup­tion and police bru­tal­i­ty. Kalu­uya, an actor of innate mag­net­ism, ful­ly dis­ap­pears into Hamp­ton, hav­ing beefed up his physique and absorbed his cadence, pos­ture and gait. Every line he speaks is imbued with heft and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and Kalu­uya clips the con­so­nants while length­en­ing and lux­u­ri­at­ing in the vow­els to cre­ate a cap­ti­vat­ing musi­cal lilt. This role is a huge step up for him in a quick march towards becom­ing one of the finest actors of his generation.

The com­plex­i­ty of the Black Pan­thers’ mis­sion is at the core of this film. As O’Neal suc­cinct­ly puts it to his FBI han­dler, ​“These moth­er­fuck­ers ain’t no ter­ror­ists”. They pore over polit­i­cal the­o­ry, earnest­ly analysing the strug­gle at school desks arranged in neat rows, and wear hair­nets to dis­trib­ute free break­fasts for poor chil­dren. They adopt para­mil­i­tary behav­iour, walk in tight for­ma­tion with their icon­ic black berets pro­trud­ing at iden­ti­cal­ly pre­cise angles. They are at once an intim­i­dat­ing force to be reck­oned with as well a bunch of young ide­al­is­tic nerds who shoul­der more of the bur­den of soci­etal evil than they can handle.

As the tragedy unfolds, the con­fi­dence and style of King’s film­mak­ing dou­bles down. The com­po­si­tion of each moment is thought­ful and beau­ti­ful with eerie flu­o­res­cence and dynam­ic cam­er­a­work adding to the film’s elec­tric atmos­phere. The direc­tor paints in shad­ow and allows the imag­i­na­tion to fill in scenes of vio­lence with­out leav­ing space for ambi­gu­i­ty. There is breath­tak­ing ten­sion and a sense of dev­as­ta­tion that is, at times, almost unbear­able. The sound­track ramps up these moments with a spare, per­cus­sive score, height­ened by a sin­gle strum of a bass or tap on a snare.

The sup­port­ing cast is uni­form­ly strong, with Jesse Ple­mons as an FBI agent embody­ing the banal­i­ty of evil, and Mar­tin Sheen as J Edgar Hoover who, despite an inex­plic­a­ble pros­thet­ic nose, cap­tures the per­ver­sion of his white suprema­cy and pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the viril­i­ty of Black men. Best of all is Dominique Fish­back as Hampton’s girl­friend Deb­o­rah, who projects intel­li­gence and gen­tle strength through the warmth of her performance.

The film’s final moments offer a dev­as­tat­ing call to arms that high­light the right­eous lega­cy of Hamp­ton. As a Black Mes­si­ah he bore the weight of the world’s sins and was sub­ject to the worst of its bru­tal­i­ty. And yet, his mes­sage endures: ​“You can mur­der a rev­o­lu­tion­ary but you can’t mur­der a revolution.”