The peculiarity of “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the new film about the betrayal that led to the murder of the Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, in 1969, is that (as has often been said of “Paradise Lost”) the Devil gets the best lines. The movie, directed by Shaka King (who co-wrote the script with Will Berson), doesn’t suggest that there’s any allure in betrayal; it simply makes the betrayer’s story more interesting, and thus falls prey to a dramatic mechanism that’s been more or less a constant throughout film history. (“Judas and the Black Messiah” is streaming on HBO Max.)
The betrayer is Bill O’Neal (played by LaKeith Stanfield), a Chicago car thief who, in 1968, became an F.B.I. informant. The betrayed is Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), a prominent member of the Illinois Black Panther Party who rose to become its chairman. The director of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), a fanatical racist and anti-Communist who voices fear that Hampton would become what the movie’s title calls him, ultimately targets him for assassination, which was carried out, on December 4, 1969, by the Chicago police, on the basis of information provided by O’Neal—who had not only spied on Hampton but infiltrated the Party and become an official within it.
O’Neal’s infiltration is, despite its political implications, a classic and ordinary crime story that gains its energy from the details of his manipulations, and from the psychological and practical tightrope that he is forced to walk in order to pull it off. Hampton’s story, by contrast, is intrinsically extraordinary, because he is marked, from the start, as an inspired personality, a genius of politics, a visionary. Hampton, who was only twenty at the start of the action (he died at twenty-one), is first seen addressing a meeting of Black college students, where, in response to a series of reforms offered by the school’s administration, he delivers an impassioned speech in which he denounces the reforms, calls for revolution, exhorts the audience to get guns with which to liberate themselves, and invites them to the Black Panther Party’s headquarters.
A supremely gifted orator, Hampton is also presented as a master strategist who works to develop a vast coalition to expand the Party’s power. He takes significant risks to reach out to the Crowns, a Black gang; the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican organization; and the Young Patriots, a group of white leftist Southerners in Chicago. (The latter group, which uses the Confederate flag as its emblem, is presented as the most surprising and uneasy of allies.) It’s representative of “Judas and the Black Messiah” that, in charting this coalition-building, it emphasizes the big event, the oratorical drama, and the grand public affirmations of unity before gathered crowds as the crux of Hampton’s political work, rather than the behind-the-scenes organization and negotiation that goes into forging such alliances.
It’s tempting to describe the movie’s depiction of Hampton as hagiographical, but that’s not intrinsically negative—Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” are great movies of hagiography. Rather, it’s a matter of finding a cinematic mode that is as exalted as such a character, and, above all, of showcasing a performance that’s similarly possessed—and which conveys a blend of reason and inspiration, passion and spontaneity, preternatural talent and prodigious energy. Kaluuya is one of the great actors of the time, but in “Judas and the Black Messiah” his performance comes across as calculated, assembled—even if it is also thrillingly committed. As I watched the movie, I found myself wishing that the role had been cast with a younger actor whose powers are just being discovered; I thought of young actors like Helena Howard and Jason Schwartzman, who débuted in starring roles of complexity and fury, dialectical intensity and intellectual fervor. In other words, “Judas and the Black Messiah” needed a coup of casting in order to find a performance that’s up to the character of Hampton. Kaluuya’s seems, instead, to render the extraordinary more ordinary, to indicate and assert Hampton’s unique, historic character rather than embodying it.
What the movie shows of Hampton’s private life is centered on his relationship with Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), a poet who introduces herself to Hampton at the student meeting. The film makes clear that Johnson made insightful contributions to Hampton’s political activities—she joins the Black Panthers as a speechwriter and coaxes Hampton to work on his own speech-making. Then, after she becomes pregnant with Hampton’s child, she comes to question her own political commitment—and Hampton’s—in the light of their impending parenthood. Yet the dramatization of their relationship reveals little complexity in their characters, and the movie doesn’t give her much of an independent existence. With its emphasis on the public implications of their relationship, the movie renders the personal side of their lives somewhat impersonal, as if it, too, were on the public stage. There is one moment, however, that leaps out—when Hampton tells her that his mother had babysat for Emmett Till, who grew up across the street from them, and whose lynching was the spark of Hampton’s own activism. It’s a moment of enormous power, but it arrives very late in the film and is dropped very quickly. It suggests what’s missing: all that isn’t said about the nature of Hampton’s activism, the mental life of the revolutionary and his private conception of his public role.
The story of O’Neal, meanwhile, is essentially a genre story, part police procedural and part political thriller—the story of a petty villain of unwittingly vast historical dimensions. He steals cars with a flourish of imagination that distinguishes him from peers: namely, he does so by flashing a faux badge and impersonating an F.B.I. agent. Then he gets arrested, and is interrogated by an actual F.B.I. agent, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who offers him a way to avoid a long prison term: by infiltrating the Black Panthers and spying on Hampton. In the course of the film, Mitchell pushes him to get closer to Hampton, to provide ever more detailed information about the chairman and about the group’s inner workings. O’Neal turns out to be an excellent impersonator—he becomes Hampton’s driver and then the Party’s chief of security. In the process, he also becomes privy to the threats that the Panthers have been facing from informants elsewhere, and the horrific fate that awaits those informants should the Party discover them.
O’Neal is caught between two unbearable prospects—a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence for car theft and impersonating a federal officer, or bringing grave harm to his own community. He has a theatrical flair for playing a revolutionary, but he is uneasy from the start about his role, and Mitchell takes exceptional pains both to flatter him and to persuade him that the job is honorable. Despite the absurdity and unprincipled self-interest of O’Neal’s crimes, the link that binds his anguish to the film’s political idea is the looming threat of incarceration, and the carceral system over-all as it functions principally to subjugate the Black community.
Mitchell’s monstrosity is on display in his clever rhetorical strategies, including, in his talks with O’Neal, his obscenely cavalier manipulations of Black pain. Like O’Neal, however, Mitchell is an operator caught in the middle, both manipulator and manipulated, a fact that becomes clear in appalling and fascinating scenes of him in conference with his immediate superior, an agent named Carlyle (Robert Longstreet), and with the supremely diabolical Hoover. Although the movie is anchored in the gross racism and brazen crimes committed by the law-enforcement establishment, from the street-level brutality and hatred of the Chicago police and the cruelty of corrections officers to the procedural injustices of judges and Hoover’s openly white-supremacist authoritarianism, it nonetheless looks with a wide-eyed fascination at Mitchell’s spidery schemes—those which he sets in motion and those in which he’s a cog.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” is a strange product of the cinematic unconscious, evidence that intentions are often overwhelmed by results. King evinces only a very hedging sympathy for the man who betrayed Hampton, and perhaps because he does not feel protective of O’Neal, he portrays him uninhibitedly, not just with flaws (the character is a walking flaw) but with all the burrs of an unshorn personality. The very contrast between the minor dealings that get O’Neal into trouble and the vast conspiratorial web of government power he is drawn into is what gives his story such energy. King’s artistic passion is, of course, aligned with Hampton; his sense of devotion, of honor, of reverence for Hampton’s story, and for the political struggle that he faces and advances, is the movie’s emotional engine. But it is O’Neal’s story that ends up taking over the movie.
