Plot points for Detroit, a fact-based recounting of events that happened 50 years ago, are discussed below.
Detroit, the latest film from writer/director team Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker), is a compelling and chilling piece of work, one filled with performances that help bring to life a horrifying night in the midst of a dreadful tumult—a small tale of injustice bringing light to a greater evil. As a piece of narrative filmmaking, however, it's somewhat messy, with characters appearing and disappearing almost haphazardly.
The film's main action centers on a night at the Algiers Motel in the middle of the 1967 riots that engulfed the city—a night during which Detroit cops tortured and executed several men they suspected of harboring a sniper. But the path taken to the Algiers is a meandering one: A quick, animated history lesson gives way to a night club bust that sparked the riots before we slide into a squad car with a trio of abusive cops riding around town musing about their role as surrogate fathers for an unruly, ungrateful citizenry. We then slide to an unsigned Motown group whose big break gets interrupted when the unrest shuts down their show before being introduced to a black security guard trying to placate white National Guard troops when the gunfire begins.
Detroit, like the city racked by violence after which it is named, feels as though it's bursting at the seams. One wonders if there's a cut of this 140-minute movie that is 30, 40, 50 minutes longer, an Altmanesque version that spends more time weaving Detroit's various threads around its horrifying set piece.
Bigelow and Boal linger on the Algiers itself—we are made to feel the desperation of the young men being beaten and mock-executed by the police, as well as the frustration of the cops trying to find the gun used to fire on them—but everything else feels rushed, compressed, condensed. Our introduction to each set of players is modest and larded up with expository dialogue; the trial of the cops and the security guard who joined them in their extralegal efforts at the end of the film is too succinct, though its brevity helps highlight the absurdity and injustice of the not-guilty verdict that inevitably comes crashing down. As such, it's sometimes hard to tell whose movie, exactly, this is.
Is the story of Officer Krauss (Will Poulter)? We spend as much time with him, Demens (Jack Reynor), and Flynn (Ben O'Toole) as almost anyone else, sitting in the squad car with the three as they discuss their unruly wards, running with them as they shoot looters in the back, huddling with them as they try to suss out the identity of the Algiers shooter, listening in as they try to plot their way out of legal trouble with Detroit PD brass. Poulter, as Krauss, is particularly good. Whereas Reynor's cop comes off as a dullard and O'Toole's as a greasy-haired caricature of a racist pig, there's a scheming quality to Poulter's face—the arched eyebrows, the widened eyes—that renders him unsympathetic yet intriguing. (His turn as a demonic cop here is a reminder that he would've been perfect as Pennywise in the upcoming adaptation of It, a part for which he was long rumored.) But Krauss et al kind of fade away toward the end of the film, bystanders as the legal system bails them out for their bad behavior.
A better argument could be made for this being the story of Larry (Algee Smith), given that he has an actual arc and undergoes meaningful change. A callow performer concerned only with fame and fortune when we first meet him, Larry has, by film's end, awakened to the ugly realities of the world and has no interest in making money by singing and dancing for white folks. And Smith's performance is arguably the film's strongest, a gut-ripping trip into a world of terror unimaginable for most in the audience. But given his late introduction and the way in which we split time with so many others in the motel, it's hard to view him as a viable lead.
You sometimes get the sense that the focus of this film should be Dismukes (John Boyega), an armed guard keeping an eye on a grocery store who gets roped into the Algiers mess. As a black man also charged with upholding order, Dismukes awkwardly straddles both worlds, at one point telling an abused young suspect that the kid's job is to survive the night. This is some of Boyega's best work—his shaking hands as he realizes he may take the fall for the actions of Krauss and his crew say more than any lines of dialogue could—but he is simply absent from large portions of the film, and we see almost nothing from his POV after the trial begins.
Narrative looseness aside, there is a great power to Detroit. Bigelow and Boal have put together a troubling portrait of a society tearing itself apart, one in which the rule of law breaks down because those who enforce it cannot be trusted. Anchored by its trio of excellent performances, Detroit is one of the most striking films of the year—and one not easily forgotten.