There is a scene early on in Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” during which Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the chairman of Chicago’s Black Panther Party (BPP), teaches a roomful of initiates the pillars of Black Panther ideology, telling them to abandon the idea that liberation for oppressed people will come through reform. Instead, true freedom will come from taking up arms against the oppressors.
“The capitalist has one goal,” Fred lectures, “and that is to exploit the people.” What Fred Hampton doesn’t know is that one of his recruits, a man named William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), is an FBI informant. Thus begins the story of the Black messiah who promised freedom for the people and the Judas who was willing to sacrifice the people’s freedom for his own. “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which releases on Feb. 12 in select theaters and on HBO Max, is surprisingly radical and refreshingly honest, presenting its socialist ideals without apology or hesitation.
The film’s greatest strength lies in its acting. Kaluuya and Stanfield both deliver exemplary, multilayered performances. Fred Hampton is a complicated man, and Kaluuya portrays the many sides of his character seamlessly. We see both the young firebrand revolutionary who never fails to rile up his supporters and the soft-spoken, introverted Fred that emerges when he is alone. Fred is torn between a desire to sacrifice everything for his ideals and the responsibility he feels for the people he loves.
Meanwhile, William O’Neal agrees to work with FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) and rat on the Black Panthers to avoid prison. However, William begins to believe the rhetoric of Fred Hampton and the BPP. Stanfield embodies William’s constant paranoia, changing beliefs and inner conflict in an understated and powerful performance.
In a roundtable interview with the cast, I asked Lakeith Stanfield about his pattern of choosing to work with politically bold directorial debuts.
“It's hard to subsidize a movie like this even, you know, to be able to tell the story,” he said. “But I hope that when people see the story, they realize that stories like this need to be told. I think it's nice to be able to be a part of something that is apparently breaking the boundaries of expectation.”
Despite being a politically radical movie, “Judas and the Black Messiah” is quiet in its resolve. King utilizes the camera as a tool of observation, following the lead characters in their moments of passion, flashes of doubt and seething anger at an unjust system that has burrowed deep into their bones. King intersperses silence between his crescendos, giving those quiet moments a sense of tension and anticipation for the next time the pot boils over.
King’s use of color is also notable, as he contrasts the cold smoke-filled gray of the FBI interrogation room with the warm greens and browns of the BPP headquarters. “Judas and the Black Messiah” is Shaka King’s first major motion picture, and it is a promising directorial debut.
However, the film’s wide scope and King’s detached directing style sometimes undermine the otherwise powerful story. The narrative arc of “Judas and the Black Messiah” does not have one singular focus. It is the story of William O’Neal, his inner struggle and the betrayal he commits against the BPP. Yet it is also the story of Fred Hampton, the idealist who sacrificed everything he loved for the people he swore to fight for. As such, the film does not dive deeply enough into either of these arcs. O’Neal’s conversion into a Black Panther is displayed in a few short scenes, and we only get to see him struggle with that cognitive dissonance briefly before we are whisked away to another point of view. While Hampton’s story receives more screen time, it could have been deeper and more multifaceted had the writers chosen to tighten their focus onto him alone.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” falls into a trap that plagues many movies based on true stories. In its quest to portray historical events exactly as they happened, the film sacrifices some of its narrative power.
In the opening scene of the movie, Hampton speaks on the topic of solidarity: “We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.” Fred Hampton was assassinated in his bed by the FBI on Dec. 4, 1969, after information leaked by William O’Neal led to the raiding of Hampton’s Chicago apartment. He spent his life contributing to the liberation of oppressed people everywhere, regardless of the color of their skin.
When asked about what young activists will take from Chairman Fred’s story, Kaluuya said he believes the real movement will come from emotion rather than logic.
“I don't believe we make stuff in order to make people who are actually on the frontlines feel seen or feel held,” Kaluuya noted in an interview. “Because it's hard on the frontline, like day in, day out showing up. So what they take from it and how they take from it, it's gonna be intimate and personal, and I want it to be that.”
Despite a general lack of focus, the message of “Judas and the Black Messiah” is quite clear: none of us can be free until all of us are free. In a time of increasing economic inequality in this country, Fred Hampton's life and story can remind us that working-class people have a lot more in common than we think. Hampton, preaching to a packed congregation, sums it up perfectly: “You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill the revolution. You can kill a freedom fighter, but you cannot kill freedom.”
