The best feature film to premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival wasn’t a micro-budgeted indie or a title that was snapped up by a distributor in a multimillion-dollar deal. It arrived courtesy of Warner Bros.: Judas and the Black Messiah. 

In a case of good timing, last month saw the digital release of the best historical documentary of 2020, MLK/FBI, director Sam Pollard’s deep dive into the federal government’s surveillance of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The warts-and-all look at J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men’s pursuit of the civil rights leader provides a crucial and absorbing precursor for Shaka King’s film, which opens this week in theaters and on HBO Max after its world premiere at Sundance. 

Based on actual events, the movie offers a more complex examination of the players involved than is unusual for biopics, and is inherently and unabashedly political. The film packs in a lot within its dense screenplay while spinning a lucid, absorbing main thread: the betrayal of the Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) by his brother-in-arms William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield). 

In the late 1960s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen, under heavy makeup) has deemed the Black Panthers as the “greatest national security risk” and assigns Special Agent Roy Mitchell to prevent the rise of a figure Hoover has designated “the Black messiah.” Mitchell finds his way into the activist organization after O’Neal has been nabbed for stealing a car while posing as an FBI agent. O’Neal faces five years for impersonating a federal officer or he can return home if he does the bidding of the feds. He takes the deal and begins volunteering at the Black Panthers’ Chicago headquarters, building trust and working his way up to becoming Hampton’s driver as well as the organization’s security officer. 

A medium shot of blood on the floor tells you all you need to know about O’Neal’s encounter with the law after he’s busted. Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography—washed-out during the day; gritty, wet streets at night—takes its cues from films like Serpico and Mean Streets without imitating them.

Meanwhile, the story line plunges forward while challenging viewers to keep a mental score card of the multiple and integral subplots. But the pace and the queasy suspense sustained by O’Neal’s actions don’t simply reduce these historical figures to a well-calibrated reenactment of domestic espionage, although it is that. What the Panthers stood for politically is made defiantly clear. The focus on the Hampton’s mission is not overshadowed by the depiction of his violent death at 21.

Like Steve McQueen’s Mangrove and Lovers Rock, about Black West Indian life in 1960s and ’70s London, the screenplay takes in the wider community, with young women taking part in the Panthers’ hierarchy, such as the composite character of Judy Harmon (Dominique Thorne), who accuses O’Neal of being a snitch and calls his bluff. 

Hampton’s relationship with activist Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) adds a new layer to the leader, who becomes more reticent and less in command in private. Their scenes offer a welcome change of mood from the cat-and-mouse skullduggery. (The real-life Johnson now goes by the name of Akua Njeri. She and her son, Fred Hampton Jr., are listed in the credits as cultural consultants.) 

Quiet, reflexive moments come organically out of nowhere, such as Hampton’s visit with the mother of a comrade who had died in a police shootout. Perhaps the film’s greatest asset is how adeptly it sees the lay of the land from O’Neal’s shifting point of view as he weighs his options. A flash of bewilderment clues us in that O’Neal’s making up excuses and explanations on the spot, whether facing a skeptical Agent Mitchell or an argumentative Panther. And when O’Neal falters, we see him sweat. 

Between the screenplay and Stanfield’s performance, the film paints a well-rounded and fascinating portrait of the paid informer while not letting O’Neal off the hook or downplaying his duplicity. In the reenactment of O’Neal’s March 1989 interview for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II, he refers to his FBI handler as one of his few male role models as part of his defense for his collaboration.

Yet this justification is undermined by Jesse Plemons’s take on Mitchell, who butters up and maintains a working relationship with his asset, inviting the informer into his home and taking him out to steak dinners. Yet Plemons often oozes smarminess and physical awkwardness rather than pulling off a smooth seduction. Mitchell reassures O’Neal early on that he’s one of the good guys who has taken on the Klan, but the whiff of condescension and anxiety linger in Mitchell’s overly earnest entreaties. All this makes O’Neal’s justifications before the TV interviewer emptier and more suspect, and just one of the intricate factors in play. 

King’s film ranks highest among this year’s Sundance features for its strong, all-around filmmaking, from the script to the melancholic score by Craig Harris and Mark Isham and to the acting. In other words, had this film, which was originally scheduled for release last August, come out in 2020, this website’s top 10 list would have likely have been different.