Movie Review: “Judas and the Black Messiah”

In this biopic about the betrayal and assassination of Fred Hampton, LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya deliver tour-de-force performances as figures doomed by history.

As seen through the eyes and lens of writer-director Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah is a fine, tautly paced historical thriller about an ideological war, made with good, if unspectacular, craft and storytelling. As seen through the performances of its two leads, however, the film takes the form of a woefully impactful American tragedy, mired in the darkest aspects of the country’s politics and indictable toward the power wielded by an establishment that felt threatened by social change. That is the power that LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya bring to this film: both actors do monumental work here, representing new highs in their remarkable young careers.

As the titular Judas, Stanfield plays Bill O’Neal, a carjacker who, upon an arrest in 1968, becomes a pawn in an illegal COINTELPRO operation for the FBI. He is to be an infiltrator and an informant within the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, posing as a devoted member and getting close with its chairman, Fred Hampton. Spearheaded by J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with quelling the burgeoning…