The legend of Robert Johnson, blues musician, juke joint prodigy, and Mississippi trailblazer, is a mythic one. A guitarist who plucked his strings so well that strangers whispered he played like a man possessed, Johnson died before the age of 30 of unknown causes. Still, he lived long enough to see the rumor grow of how on a dark night at a crossroads in the Delta, he handed his guitar to a large menacing figure for a tune up. When it was returned to him, it came with the musical ecstasy of the damned. Johnson reportedly did not discourage these stories, nor the implications of a supposedly pointy-tailed fallen angel being the one who taught him the meaning of the blues. However, writer-director Ryan Coogler seems to focus on a deeper truth beneath this folktale in Sinners, his new film set around the same Mississippi Delta and backroad barnburners. In this Southern Gothic milieu, the filmmaker depicts that silver-tongued Prince of Lies without the scales or the scars. Like the countenance of so much that bedevils this land, his face is white, his smile inviting, and his interest devoid of wanting to share music. This one is all about commandeering it. Instead of a story of demonic trade, it’s a tale of hellish acquisition and taking possession by a different, all too commonplace method.  It is, in other words, an American fable. The sweltering allegory carries with it a fire and fury, too, which slowly and steadily reaches an inferno greater than the occasionally constrictive horror movie trappings that encase it. Set in 1932 and in the sticks outside Clarksdale, Sinners begins as the tale of two prodigal sons and local boys finally returning home to the Deep South, although not necessarily in hopes of reclamation. Like the title suggests, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, both)  are of a Gomorrah disposition after spending seven years as bootleggers in Chicago. They made enough of a fortune to open a gin joint of their own, but as Stack tells it to their all-grown cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), “Chicago is a plantation, just with taller buildings.” Better the devil they know. While Smoke/Stack are the flashy centers of the film, it is cousin Sammie who is the story’s soul. Also known as Preacher Boy because his father is the pastor for the Black sharecroppers on a nearby plantation, Sammie was raised to play his music for God… but he much prefers the secular blues sound he can dominate at the new juke joint Smoke ‘n Stack are opening up this very night at an abandoned slaughterhouse in the middle of nowhere. At first it is glorious to hear Caton’s young and already lamentable voice waft through the night air and turn the head of every important local and passerby who doesn’t devote their evenings to Jesus. This includes Smoke’s old flame with strong roots in the superstitions of the Louisiana Bayou, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku); Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), shrewd Asian American entrepreneurs who own two convenience stores that sell identical products on different sides of the streets, one for the white residents and one for the Black; lovable drunk and longtime blues pioneer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), the white-passing young woman of mixed heritage and even more complex feelings toward Smoke/Stack. There’s also the Devil. Or at least Jack O’Connell’s Remmick is something close to it when he shows up at the door of the juke joint with a banjo and two camp followers. All toothy grins which can somehow conceal fangs, and eyes that intermittently turn red, one gets the creeping suspicion Remmick is almost as old as the religions Sammie and Annie keep. He also presents an eternally seductive promise: fellowship and bohemia without hatred or division in the ranks among his clan. All you have to do is let him wrap his teeth around your neck. So Sinners is a vampire movie, and very much of the late night drive-in styling that inspired the similar setup of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). In its earlier and stronger half, however, it is also a portrait of a time and place of hard lives lived and ruined in an ostensibly beatific land. Coogler wallows in the seductive evil of his location too. As one of the first filmmakers not named Christopher Nolan allowed to use IMAX cameras on an original story, Coogler basks in shots of Smoke and Stack driving separate open-top cars through rolling green hills peppered with specks of white cotton. To an undiscerning eye, perhaps even Smoke/Stacks’ nostalgic ones, it might look like heaven. But to any viewer, the implication of that cash king crop that led to the enslavement of their ancestors, and the still hardly-better-than-enslavement of good men and women like Sammie’s parents, is implicit. In a land as deceptively sinister as this, what harm is there in taking control of one’s escape, if even for a couple of hours, with the price being on the contraband booze and getting by a surly bouncer they call Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller)? One senses Jordan’s brothers have done bad things and are probably bad men, but nothing about what they’re offering is evil. It is the always white eyes of those who wish to subsume it that introduce the taste of perversity. In these larger thematic contextualizations, Sinners works at its best. Some viewers might begrudge the film’s relaxed and unhurried first act, which spends close to an hour in the daylight before night descends. But the confident hang-out-movie mentality allows a superb ensemble to add flavor and dimension to who these people are and were before they inevitably drop like flies. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! One senses Coogler smiling as his camera follows Li as she walks between the white world and Black via the main street dividing the town; there’s a similar bemusement in the lingering beat on the grin of Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married woman who emphasizes her marital status to Sammie, but does not blink when he asks if it’s “happily” so. He then invites her to the blues show. Most impressively is the sequence where Sammie’s guitar carries the film to a metaphysical place that transcends earthly concerns, even of the vampiric variety. Obviously the biggest showcase among the castings is Jordan, Coogler’s longtime muse who gets to do double duty as one brother who might be redeemable and another who probably walks the primrose path. We’ll let you figure out which is which. But as showy a movie star turn as it is, the whole ensemble works well together. It’s when they take a turn toward the creature feature elements that the movie runs into trouble. O’Connell does the best work we’ve seen from the Irish actor as a Celtic revenant, but when his implied violence becomes literal, Coogler attempts to slide into the grindhouse aesthetic of Tarantino or Rodriguez. Yet these sequences feel oddly rushed and unevenly plotted. Freshly turned vampires make bizarre and inexplicable choices, and slapdash attempts to evoke famous sequences from John Carpenter and other genre masters betray a harried quality to the film’s third act. Even its titular conflict between Christian values and earthly practicalities appears to be left vaguely dangling. Sinners is nonetheless an achievement of style and tone. It suffers from shaggier flaws in the margins, but those blemishes do not hamper the immense enjoyment factor, particularly after its predictable but oh, so delicious mid-credits coda. This is an epic yarn and tall tale befitting the world it depicts. Its satisfaction stems from the textures and details a raconteur as gifted as Coogler can provide in the telling. It also is meant to be communally shared and savored, a Southern ghost story with a bloody punchline worthy of remembering. And repeating. Sinners is in theaters Friday, April 18. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.