Detroit

Detroit (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from www.freefall-productions.com)

2017 / US / 143 minutes

“Nice try… But you have my statement: Police criminality needs to treated the same as any other form of criminality.”

Director: Kathryn Bigelow / Screenplay: Mark Boal / Director of Photography: Barry Ackroyd / Music: James Newton Howard / Production: Colin Wilson, Kathryn Bigelow, Matthew Budman, Mark Boal and Megan Ellison for Annapurna Pictures / Cast: John Boyega (Melvin Dismukes), Will Poulter (Krauss), Algee Smith (Larry Reed), Jacob Latimore (Fred Temple), Jason Mitchell (Carl Cooper), Hannah Murray (Julie Ann Hysell), Kaitlyn Dever (Karen Malloy), Jack Reynor (Demens), Anthony Mackie (Karl Greene), John Krasinski (Auerbach), Nathan Davis, Jr. (Aubrey Pollard, Jr.), Ben O’Toole (Flynn), Gbenga Akinnagbe (Aubrey Pollard, Sr.).

In July 1967 the Detroit Police Department raided a party for returning black Vietnam veterans at an unlicensed after hours club. The raid and the arrests that followed sparked off a protest that escalated into several days of rioting throughout the city. Fifty years later, Kathryn Bigelow was a decade into her ongoing collaboration with journalist turned screenwriter Mark Boal.

   Focussing on one particular story from the Detroit riots- the notorious at the time but since largely forgotten “Algiers Motel Incident”- Bigelow and Boal fashioned an intense, brutal and uncompromising film that drew undeniable parallels between the past and present of American race relations and urban decay.

   Detroit follows Larry Reed (Algee Smith), a member of up and coming Soul band The Dramatics, and his friend Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) as they seek refuge from the burning streets and check into the Algiers instead of trying to make it home after a cancelled show. Larry and Fred meet two white girls, Julie (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever), by the motel pool and later join them at a party held in one of the rooms.

   At the party, another black youth named Carl Cooper (Jason Mitchell) fires a starting pistol out of the window as a joke but the police and soldiers patrolling the streets outside believe they are under fire from a sniper. The Algiers is immediately raided and Cooper is shot dead by DPD cop Krauss (Will Poulter), a racist officer already under investigation for the fatal shooting of a looter.

   The remaining Tangiers guests at the party, as well as Karl Greene, another Vietnam veteran saying at the motel (Anthony Mackie), are then lined up by Krauss and his men. Unable to find the “Sniper”’s weapon and already enraged by the discovery of the two white girls among the otherwise all male, all black group, the officers begin to aggressively interrogate the guests.

   Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a security guard watching over a nearby shop, then enters the Tangiers to try and calm the situation. A black man in a position of some authority, Dismukes tries to act as a bridge between the police and the suspects but things spiral further out of control when Krauss initiates “The Death Game”, staging mock executions of the suspects to scare the others into confessing.

   This goes on until one officer misunderstands Krauss’s instructions to stage an execution in another room and really does kill a suspect. Krauss and the other officers then begin to panic, abandon the search for the gun and try to come up with a way out of the situation…

   Although several names are changed (and another member of the Dramatics who was present is left out entirely), Detroit follows the real events as accurately as they can be pieced together and transferred to a film narrative. As Boal explained at the time of the film’s release, “This script is built on a sturdy base of journalism and history, but it is not the same as journalism or history, nor does it aspire to be”.

   Like fellow ’80’s and ’90’s stylist turned ’00’s and ’10’s realist Michael Mann, Bigelow has been predominantly concentrating on adapting true stories in recent years (Detroit even begins with an animated “History Lesson” similar to the one that opens the Mann- produced The Kingdom (2007) to get audiences up to speed). But Detroit actually owes a great deal to her 1995 Sci- Fi thriller, Strange Days.

   Just as Detroit would be twenty years later, Strange Days was a huge critical success but a massive commercial failure. It also blended the same themes of institutional corruption and potential societal collapse in an incendiary time and place, albeit a fictional near- future one rather than the real past. Looking deeper, Detroit’s struggling musicians on the verge of making it and the film’s racial and sexual politics can also be traced back to the earlier film (which, for my money, remains Bigelow’s best).

   Such comparisons are not likely to interest the director herself anymore though. During her acceptance speech at the 2010 Oscars where she became the first woman to receive the Best Director award (for 2009’s The Hurt Locker), Bigelow made no reference at all to her gender. And like The Hurt Locker, her second collaboration with Boal, Zero Dark Thirty (2013), tried to remain as apolitical and dispassionate as an American film about American foreign policy possibly could.