Wrongdoing without redemption

Things got out of hand in Detroit the summer of 1967, when police raided an unlicensed bar in a black neighborhood. That incident tossed a lit match over long-smoldering resentments that erupted into five chaotic days of arson, looting, and shooting. Detroit, a powerfully depressing film, begins with footage of the city’s destruction, then zooms into another police raid that happened the same week—one that is lesser-known but also got horribly out of hand.

While the city streets are tense with fidgety cops and irate protesters, a group of young black singers waits in the backstage of a downtown theater, its members eager to showcase their talent to a large crowd. These young hopefuls don’t seem too concerned about outside events—they just want their moment to sing and shine. But as the riot escalates, the city evacuates the auditorium just before their performance. Crestfallen, lead singer Larry (Algee Smith) and best friend Fred (Jacob Latimore) roam their motel for some fun distraction. At the motel pool they meet two white women, Karen (Kaitlyn Dever) and Julie (Hannah Murray), flirt some, and join a party of other black men. One joke leads to another, until one man picks up a starting pistol and fires blanks at the troops stationed outside, assuming they’ll never figure out where the shots came from.

He is deadly wrong. Police invade the motel with armed weapons and round up the occupants—all black men except for Karen and Julie—for interrogation. The specifics of what happens next are a dramatized recreation based on testimonies and research (screenwriter Mark Boal is a former journalist), but the numbers are factual: By the end of the night, three black youths are dead, and the other nine—seven black men and two white women—leave with bruises and cuts. The Algiers Motel incident, as the case is soon known, leads to trials charging three white police officers and one black security guard with various crimes, including murder and conspiracy to commit civil rights abuse. No spoilers, but the verdicts are hardly surprising.

Thus Detroit simmers and seethes with a “Profound Angry Message”: Racism and police brutality, it seems to suggest, are still very much alive today. Characters in the film voice shock and disbelief that resonate with the same “how is this still happening” ethos surrounding today’s controversies over police shootings. “Can you believe this is the USA?” one cop asks his partner as they drive through a smoking Detroit. Karen screams, “This is 1967!” at police when they harass her for “whoring” with black men.

By focusing on the Algiers Motel incident during this Black Lives Matter era, Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow seem to imply that things remain unchanged since the 1960s—and that racism is not just a matter of personal prejudice but a systemic wrong still polluting the bloodstreams of American history, civilization, and courts. That’s a heady concept worth a thousand academic papers and essays, but Boal and Bigelow use the mighty medium of film not just to educate but to sicken their audience with visceral, disturbing scenes of abuse and injustice. (The film earns an R rating for violence, profanity, and nudity.)

And that’s the problem with Detroit. At a time when the nation is cracking with racial and political divisions, Detroit stokes a fire of fury and disgust without any thread of redemption or hope. The characterizations feel lazy, with little complexity—the victims are cast as pitiful, and the villains are too easy to hate. Officer Krauss (Will Poulter) is a sadistic sociopath, contemptible in every way, and his minions are cruel and spineless.

At the end of the film, the audience is left only with an unresolved tangle of rage—the same kind that sparked the riot of 1967.