Motor City on fire

After writing, and in some respects rewriting, modern history with lightning in the excellent Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow looks back 50 years for her follow-up film Detroit. Fascinated by violent, mostly masculine group dynamics, Bigelow reteams with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal for this visceral take on the 1967 Detroit riots that left 43 people dead, mostly focusing on the horrifying events that occurred at the Algiers Motel.

The opening third of Detroit, a rhythmically careening depiction of the early days of the riot, stands as one of the most electric and original pieces of filmmaking in Bigelow’s career. Bigelow usually thrives on iron-fisted control, but the opening passage of Detroit feels loose-limbed, spacious and expansive, quite unlike anything else in her frequently taut and claustrophobic filmography.

Bigelow and Boal not only fill in the social history of the city, outlining the key reasons that the riot started (the usual suspects: police brutality and racial inequality), but they also introduce dozens of key characters with an almost musical grace. The ensemble cast includes John Boyega as security guard Melvin Dismukes, Will Poulter as psycho cop Philip Krauss and Algee Smith as The Dramatics singer Larry Reed, with familiar faces like Anthony Mackie and John Krasinski showing up in smaller roles.

After that bracing introduction, the film assembles the disparate characters at their intersection of destiny, the Algiers Motel. Several days into the riot, bloodthirsty Detroit police officers overresponded to an unfounded report of sniper fire, torturing a group of teenagers who were partying at the motel, leaving three African-American males dead. State Troopers and National Guardsmen activated by the state and federal governments to keep the peace also appeared on the scene, but largely declined to intervene in the dehumanizing events.

Unlike the opening section of Detroit, the long middle portion depicting the Algiers Motel incident fits right into the Bigelow/Boal wheelhouse. Tense, intimate and frightening, with an escalating tension that appears increasingly unresolvable, the sequence plays like an extended version of the bomb defusing sequences from The Hurt Locker. Every word and gesture seems attached to a hair-trigger.

The final movement of Detroit also feels unlike anything else in the Bigelow filmography, unfortunately landing more in the wheelhouse of awards-grubbing commoners. This last portion of the film covers the cover-up, morphing into a rote courtroom drama crossed with a rote “dirty cops” procedural, while also indulging in cobwebbed biopic clichés and erratic, momentum-crushing timeline leaps, and the closing scenes of Detroit expose Bigelow’s general awkwardness with warmth.

Despite a sputtering finish, the first 110 minutes or so of the film’s 143-minute running time are strong enough to warrant a hearty recommendation. Detroit offers the sort of invigorating, disturbing, explosive, socially relevant large-scale cinema that many assumed extinct.