In “Detroit,” director Kathryn Bigelow concentrates and refracts the 1967 riots in that eponymous city through the lens of one of its most notorious yet largely forgotten incidents, when a group of white police officers tortured and murdered a group of teenagers at the Algiers Motel, then covered it up.
Of a piece with Bigelow’s Oscar-winning 2008 Iraq drama “The Hurt Locker” and 2012’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” the tense, harrowingly intimate “Detroit” rounds out a trilogy of fact-based, fog-of-war interpretive histories. Even though it’s based on an episode that occurred half a century ago, it feels like her timeliest movie yet.
As titles go, “The Battle of Algiers” was already taken, and probably too on the nose. But comparisons to Gillo Pontecorvo’s seminal 1966 political thriller are inevitable as “Detroit’s” tightly coiled situational drama takes shape.
After a prologue describing the mass migration of Southern blacks to Northern urban centers, the film takes viewers into the after-hours club at 12th and Clairmount Avenue where, in the early hours of Sunday, July 23, the Detroit police conducted a raid on a party being thrown for a soldier returning from Vietnam.
As the police were leading their charges out of the building, a crowd gathered and a disturbance ensued that would lead to five days of fires, looting, mass arrests, savage police brutality and more than 40 deaths.
But just when the viewer thinks that “Detroit” will be a “tick-tock” narrative of the mayhem and sociopolitical upheaval that defined the nearly weeklong rebellion, Bigelow makes a radical shift, following a singer named Larry Reed (Algee Smith) as he and his group the Dramatics prepare for a career-making set at Detroit’s Fox Theatre. When the show is canceled because of security issues outside, Larry and the band’s manager Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) take refuge at the Algiers, where the vibe promises to be far mellower, more welcoming and safe.
It’s at this point that “Detroit,” which was written by Bigelow’s frequent collaborator Mark Boal, goes from being a bluntly effective you-are-there exercise to something far more daring, sophisticated and unforgettably disturbing. Rather than treat the Algiers as yet one more data point within a timeline that eventually included the arrival of the National Guard and, finally, the U.S. Army, Bigelow drills down into one of American history’s most egregious cases of abuse of police power, bringing it to life with visceral detail and slowed-down meticulousness.
“Detroit” is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental.
Detroit
(Playing at Stadium 9 and the Gaslight)
Rating: R
Genre: Drama, mystery & suspense
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Runtime: 2 hr. 22 min.
Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 96%
