Detroit (15) ****
Dir: Kathryn Bigelow
With: John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith
Runtime: 143 minutes
IT may be seen as timely that this searing drama about racism in the US should be released just as the country is engulfed in fresh, Trump-exacerbated turmoil on the subject.
But as the recent tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, show, such films are never out of date. Any decade, any year, any month, the likes of Detroit, based on a true story, will still be relevant.
That’s the politics of the piece. As an example of cinema at its most powerful and hard-hitting, Kathryn Bigelow’s look at what happened in the riots of 1967 will similarly not date. With material of this calibre, the director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty is welcome to ply her trade in the release schedules anytime she wants.
Bigelow, working from a screenplay by writing partner Mark Boal, introduces the audience to Detroit at the tail-end of the 1960s as a cash-starved, hollowed-out hellscape ruled by a white police force. This July evening begins like many another with a police raid on a drinking club. This time, however, the neighbourhood is not prepared to stand by as people are loaded into police vans.
The rioting would go on for five days, with Bigelow’s Oscar-winning skills in depicting war zones put to good use. Detroit is burning and no-one, not politicians, not local leaders, not the police, seems able to get the inferno under control.
Instead of staying with the riot for the duration, Bigelow homes in on an incident that took place in the city’s Algiers Motel over the course of one horrific night. First, she introduces the key characters through which the story will be told: two members of a black singing group who take refuge there as the rioting worsens; a black security guard (played by John Boyega) who is guarding a shop nearby but calls in at the motel; and a trio of white cops, led by Will Poulter’s Krauss, who are high on hate and adrenaline.
After someone in the motel fires a toy gun out of the window, the police and troops descend. Krauss assumes control, determined to find out who fired the shots. As if staging some twisted pastiche of an Agatha Christie play, he gathers his “suspects” downstairs, to begin his interrogations. What follows is a gruelling watch. Be warned: some may find the unrelenting violence too much to bear. If Bigelow’s intention was to give the viewer the sense of being trapped in a nightmare she succeeds.
She only eases up on the tension in the final act of her 143-minute picture when she begins to document what happened after that night. Joining Bigelow in the task of keeping the audience gripped is a young cast whose performances range from superb to star-making. Boyega has a tough gig, his security guard character trying to keep the peace but not being able to stop what is going on. The young Londoner rises to the challenge in a seemingly effortless, seriously impressive, way. Boyega might have been best known to date as the kid from Star Wars, but consider him a kid no longer. His performance here could be the stuff of Oscar nods.
Will Poulter, a young British actor who made his debut as a sweet scally in the coming of age comedy, Son of Rambow, is unrecognisable as an American face of hate, urging others further into the moral abyss. Algee Smith, having spent his career to date mostly in US television, is the relative newcomer of the bunch but makes his mark as the singer of pop songs who finds his perspective on life changed forever by that night.
Having made history by becoming the first woman to win a best director Oscar (for 2008’s The Hurt Locker) and acclaim for Zero Dark Thirty, the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Bigelow could have had her pick of projects. That she chose this story is testament to her determination to make films that matter. Movies that have no expiry date. Cinema that stays in the mind for a long time after. Unmissable.
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