Devastating 'Detroit' is about race in 2017, not just 1967

Every once and while there's a period film that is as much about the modern time in which its being released as the era it seeks to re-create.

Fifty years ago, Bonnie & Clyde (starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) spoke to the burgeoning rebellious youth movement and the rise of the more radical politics of the 1960s.

And just a few years ago Ava DuVernay's Selma underlined the value of the recently gutted Voting Rights Act with her stirring recreation of the 1965 Martin Luther King Jr.-led effort to get it passed in the first place.

Now we have Kathryn Bigelow's new masterpiece -- Detroit -- perhaps the most emotionally fulfilling piece of filmmaking she has ever done, and a film that has unfortunately been overlooked amid the busy summer movie season, by audiences if not by critics.

There has been some quibbling about a white woman telling a reality-based story about the 1967 race riots, but this is not a story just about African-Americans, it is very much a complicated tale of white and black, police and the community they are sworn to protect and serve, as well as the sexual and violent tensions that are almost always beneath the surface to this day.

There may be a more legitimate complaint about the fact that black women do not factor prominently in this narrative, but there is no denying this movie's emotional power. It is, simply put, one of the best movies I've seen this year.

The film unfolds at first with almost documentary-like precision, showing how the riots broke out and escalated and how there were sins and blame to go around on various sides of the conflict. Eventually though, the story starts to focus on one particularly harrowing situation at a hotel, where local cops terrorize a group of young black men (and two white, female would-be romantic partners) because they believe a sniper is in their midsts. On the periphery is John Boyega as an earnest security guard just hoping to keep the piece.

His character is nuanced, but so are many others. The white policemen are undoubtedly racist, but not in an over-the-top mustache twirling way -- their bigotry has degrees, sometimes soft, other times hard. Their self-pity is always several steps ahead of their ability to empathize with people of color, and their insecurities are reminiscent of the rhetoric of modern white supremacists and alt-righters, who should be forced to watch this movie if only to see how empty their intellectualism is.

This is a tough slog of a film. Unlike feel-good racial fantasies like The Help, this film doesn't shy away from the brutality and the climate of horror that living in a police state was and is. But Bigelow's camera is unflinching. There are moments of levity and pathos, but this is not a sentimental film, it's a tough necessary one.

I've seen three masterworks this year, Get Out, Dunkirk, and now this. Each one demonstrated a sure directorial vision and hand at play, with a real story to tell that's bigger than what is on screen. The tragedy is that unlike those two films, Detroit has struggled to connect with viewers, and I feel it will continue to, even if the headlines (and the president's own racist rhetoric) would suggest that its as timely and relevant of movie as any released this year so far.

I know it's hard, especially this far outside of awards season, to persuade moviegoers to see a gut-wrenching and disturbing film that brings up still raw feelings about biased policing and economic marginalization of minorities. But this is vital, must-see filmmaking of the first order.

I don't even care if there an inevitable backlash to the creative license the film takes with the facts of the real life story on which it is based; the value of Detroit outweighs the detractions. It's the movie of the moment, even if it takes place in 1967.