Michael B. Jordan Plays One Twin Hotter Than The Other Twin in 'Sinners'

Many such cases.

Spoilers for Sinners below.¹

Michael B. Jordan as Stack (left) and Michael B. Jordan as Smoke (right) in Sinners.

One of my favorite lines in The Godfather Part II is the simplest. It’s the kind of line I think about all the time, that my mind offers unprompted: “It was between the brothers, Kay.” Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is well into his tenure as the don when a Senate committee on organized crime threatens his whole operation. Just when a Bronx capo, Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), is about to grandstand at the hearing and implicate Michael himself, Michael arrives flanked by a strange man. It’s Pentangeli’s brother, flown in from Sicily. The brothers look at one another and Frank swears he made all his testimony up. A fearful Kay (Diane Keaton) confronts her husband after. What was being threatened there, how was just seeing his brother next to Michael enough to make a man so afraid? Michael’s answer is curt and cold: “It was between the brothers, Kay,” he says simply. “I had nothing to do with it.”

That line was on my mind when I saw Sinners on Easter Sunday (a movie about vampires on the day we celebrate Jesus being put in rice and then put to work again). Michael B. Jordan plays a set of twins who’ve returned to their home in South to start a juke joint. Smoke is deliberate and direct. Stack is hedonistic and hot-tempered. Jordan is excellent at playing each man as an individual, with distinct tones and unique movements. Smoke stalks ahead; Stack all but skips. The first achievement of Sinners is how finely it characterizes their bond: they love each other deeply and can decipher the other’s imperceptible moods. They move in concert.

With stolen money, they buy an old sawmill to start their club. The sequence plays like a well-plotted GRWM, it moves as finely and as tenderly as what it feels like to wander into your friend’s bathroom and watch her do her makeup before a night out: every pause is pregnant with so much expectation, with the promise of one of those really great nights. Smoke buys the food and arranges for there to be a sign outside the club. Stack books the musician and avoids an ex. Their anticipation builds.

What they don’t know, and what they won’t know for about 30 more minutes, is that vampires are heading to their party too. It’s a smart metaphor that sometimes Sinners hangs onto a bit too tightly²: the vampires are whiteness, commercialization, and commodification, all made slippery and sinewy. The black folks inside resist at first, but many get caught or give in — bell hooks’ “Eating The Other” brought to a fleshy realization.

Stack is lured into the vampires, while Smoke is desperate for a way out. Jordan is so good at playing that difference, and, eventually, how it implodes. Stack is bitten and bleeds out. Smoke cradles his brother’s head. “He’s the best thing about me,” he says of his twin. It’s between the brothers. That searing grief makes for one of the movie’s best scenes.

Part of the greatness of Jordan’s instincts is how he never loses control of the gradations between both men. Is that a polite way to say that, like, say, Armie Hammer in The Social Network before him, Michael B. Jordan plays one twin as hotter than the other one? It’s between the brothers, yes, and one has a little extra sugar in his bowl.