I love screen weasels, and LaKeith Stanfield gives us a monumental one in Judas and the Black Messiah.
Monumental, because not only is it a great performance—it’s also a portrait of a crucial and brutal moment in history. Stanfield plays Bill O’Neal, a character based on the car thief turned FBI informant who infiltrated Chicago’s Black Panthers in the late 1960s. While rising to become head of security, O’Neal passed on various information to the feds, which ultimately led to the police raid and killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).
As an actor, Stanfield combines a laconic, low-energy exterior with a frazzled, frantic interior. His slope and slouch are almost always (purposefully) working against his eyes, which are on guard and alert. This may be why his zombified yet panicked Andre in Get Out, though essentially a cameo, is his most defining performance. The best Stanfield characters are cool on the outside while screaming on the inside.
This includes Bill O’Neal, whom we first meet as he swaggers into a bar, posing as an FBI agent and attempting to intimidate one of the patrons into giving up his car. (When they sniff him out, those eyes go wide.) The attempted scam lands him on the radar of an actual FBI man named Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemmons), who offers him a deal: if he goes undercover with the Black Panthers, he’ll avoid jail and make some money.
The rest of the movie is a livewire act of watching O’Neal try to keep his inner crisis from overwhelming his outer cool. There’s an electric moment in which a group of Panthers are talking about a rat who was exposed in another chapter; O’Neal goes on a hyped, protest-too-much rant about the violence he would have inflicted upon the spy if he had caught him. It’s panic contorted into performance. Then there are the quieter moments where Stanfield finds the humanity within the weasel, as when O’Neal leads the restoration of the Black Panther headquarters after the police have burned it down. Previously apolitical, is he becoming convinced by the rhetoric of those he’s betraying?
You could understand why, given the charismatic confidence that Kaluuya brings to the part of Fred Hampton. A burly boulder of a man, his Hampton has a certain stillness—there’s no panic to him at all—yet his words come out with a rat-a-tat-tat ferocity that is nevertheless always rational. (There’s a nice little aside where we see Hampton, alone, listening to a record of a Malcolm X speech and mimicking the cadences.) As much as Judas and the Black Messiah should be a coronation of Stanfield as one of our best young actors, it’s also a confirmation of Kaluuya’s considerable talent.
Indeed, there are terrific performances across the board. Plemmons plays Mitchell like an oily boy scout, while Dominique Fishback—so good in the little-seen Night Comes On—lends the movie an entirely different flavor as Deborah Johnson, a poet who joins the Panthers, becomes a speechwriter for Hampton, and then his partner and mother of his child. Fishback has an amazing moment during one of Hampton’s speeches, when he declares “I’m gonna die for the people!,” where you can see the conflict on her face between the cause she believes in and the family she’s just beginning to form.
Behind the camera, director Shaka King ensures that, while rich with period detail, Judas and the Black Messiah never feels like a staid capsule from a time long ago. The camera is always on the prowl, often circling the characters. This is history, but it’s also alive. It’s the story of a weasel caught—and complicit in—a crossroads, one that leads directly to where we find ourselves today.
