Kathryn Bigelow's DETROIT is a tense and unnerving film, no doubt produced to reflect the American political landscape we are currently inhabiting. Set during the 1967 Detroit riots and depicting one particularly notable case of police brutality, there is no denying that Bigelow and the film's producers are clearly using the story as a case of history repeating itself; fortunately, it never veers into gritty exploitation nor didactic histrionics.

Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the film is how well it avoids being preachy. I was expecting a much more black-and-white (no pun intended) depiction of Detroit's mostly-black citizenry and Detroit's mostly-white police force, the underdogs pitted against The Man. While there's no doubt that the primary antagonist (played rather brilliantly by the strangely-eyebrowed Will Poulter) is particularly vile, he doesn't come across as inhuman. Rather, much like how most evil has transpired in the world, all of his actions come from his own faulty rationale. He doesn't think anything he's doing is wrong, and that's the terrifying part. Nobody, really, thinks of themselves as a bad person, especially bad people.

Also, interestingly, there's no singular protagonist. The residents of the Algiers Motel (which is where the second act of the film takes place, as police raid it during the riots after suspecting they witnessed sniper fire) serve as a unified protagonist and John Boyega plays a security guard who sides with the police in trying to bring order, fulfilling the trope of a Good Man in a Bad World. It should also be noted that the citizenry are not portrayed as innocent angels either. While I don't think the film is necessarily equating them on a moral plane a la Donald "Many Sides" Trump, their portrayal is frank, honest, but above all believable.

I'm tiptoeing around the specific plot mechanics because, albeit based on a true story, the film is unpredictable (to the point that I'm surprised the filmmakers got away, legally, with telling this story). All I have to say is that if the film has one flaw, it's that Mark Boal's screenplay could have been trimmed down. The second act is so well-executed and intense that I expected only about ten minutes more of movie but instead got another hour of a courtroom drama, and the film never returns to those dramatic heights. There's also a subplot involving a real-life R&B group called The Dramatics (its lead singer played by Algee Smith) and their trials and tribulations that has no evident payoff and could have been excised altogether, feeling as if it belongs in a more generic biopic about the Detroit music scene.

That being said, the strong parts are indeed so strong that DETROIT ends up being one of my favorite movies so far this year. Its cinema-verite cinematography doesn't feel forced nor does it dizzy the audience. It's a necessary film and only solidifies Bigelow as the best action filmmaker working now. Fortunately, she doesn't work in schlock.