There have been so many bio-pics that it doesn't seem to matter who the focus is, the film feels exactly the same. Occasionally though, someone manages to make a biographical film that feels a bit different and that's what Shaka King has done here.
The film is about Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in the late 60s but interestingly he is not the main character here. Instead, we see Hampton through the eyes of William 'Bill' O'Neal, who was secretly working for the FBI and betrays Hampton. It's a really clever way of accessing the story makes for a far more interesting film.
I found Bill a fascinating character. He begins the film as a car thief, using a fake FBI badge to get people to hand him their keys and then zooming off. When he's caught he's enlisted by special agent handler Roy Mitchell (an excellent Jesse Plemons) and is tasked with infiltrating the Black Panthers and getting close to Hampton, all the time passing intel back to the FBI. Lakeith Stanfield is great in the role and it's fascinating how they never pitch the character's motivation clearly. I couldn't quite work how whether O'Neal was totally committed to his FBI role or whether he sympathized with Hampton- my conclusion was that he was somewhere in between, which is a confusing place to have been.
I really enjoyed how the film used traditionally aspects from undercover thrillers. O'Neal spends much of the film in utter fear that his position as an FBI informant will be uncovered and that it will lead to a gruesome end.
Daniel Kaluuya is spell-binding as Hampton. He successfully captures his power as a leader and speaker but it's perhaps the other side of Hampton that is more interesting. The film balances out the public side with a private side showing Hampton as caring and loving with a partner (Dominique Fishback) and baby on the way and showing a familial aspect to the Black Panthers. We see his anger at the black community's lot in society and see him fighting against that but we also see him working to help the black community in other ways including attempting to set up a medical centre. In other portrayals of Hampton I've seen, including The Trial of the Chicago 7, he's simply shown to be angry and shouty but this film makes him so much more human.
In the background of the film are the FBI's efforts to take down Hampton and the Black Panthers. I found this hugely disturbing, from J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) declaring the Panthers to be the greatest threat to National Security to Jesse Plemons special agent handler with his nice guy act despite clearly being a horrific human. The treatment of the Black Panthers by the FBI is deplorable and though I had a sense of it previously, this film really showed me just how horrific it was.
A really effective way of bringing Fred Hampton's story to the big screen and two fantastic lead performances.
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