Get the latest gossip
Sinners’s Music Goes for the Jugular
The film upends what we’ve come to expect from stories about the blues.
Sammie feels like a clever composite of Robert Johnson, who is famously rumored to have cut a bargain with the devil for his skills; John Lee Hooker, whose sharecropper-pastor father resented his instrument; and Muddy Waters, whose labels goaded him into muted playing styles to cater to wider (and whiter) audiences. The film slowly ditches the care with which its diorama of ’30s farmers, grocers, and Chitlin’ Circuit would-bes was assembled to bring them in contact with the unattributed musical borrowing and dippy togetherness of the ’60s; the vamps’ offer imagines a begging for the keys to the kingdom of rock and roll taking place ahead of the pilfering. Like a Cowboy Carter allotted just five minutes to make a case for the vast reach of the guitar, Sinners stresses that the boundary-immolating power of music is not just sufficient to pique the interest of these creatures of the night but to shake you out of any idea where the thing you’re watching was heading.
Or read this on VULTURE