There is no nice or pretty way to tell a story about the systemic oppression and mistreatment of black people in the United States. It's fitting then that Kathryn Bigelow's " Detroit ," an account of the murders of three unarmed black men that took place in the Algiers Motel in late July 1967, is neither — it is an all-out assault on your senses and soul. 
 
 It's hard to overstate just how visceral and harrowing an experience it is. "Detroit" is a well-made and evocative film that is also numbingly brutal with little to no reprieve. And while it might be the only true way to tell this story, it's also one that is not going to be for everyone. The stomach-churning horror begins immediately and does not let up for 2 hours and 23 minutes. 
 
 To set the stage for the Algiers Motel, Bigelow begins by speeding through the history of black people in United States with animated acrylics and pounding music — emancipation, the great migration, white flight and the racist zoning practices that led to the overcrowding of black residents in urban pockets. Tensions have already reached a tipping point, and then in the summer of 1967, Detroit police bust an after-hours club in what would become the inciting incident for the riots. 
 
 Three days after the riots begin, a local singing group called The Dramatics are about to go on stage at a big, crowded theater hoping to get their big break, but are interrupted and sent home due to the events outside. The men exit the theater in their sparkly suits into what looks like a war zone. As they run through the streets they assure every cop who isn't already beating someone with a night stick that they're just on their way home. Bigelow shows all of this with handheld, ground level docudrama realism. There is no orienting yourself to the bigger picture, only what is right in front of you. 
 
 The charismatic lead singer Larry (Algee Smith) and his buddy Fred (Jacob Latimore) decide to peel off and get an $11 room at the Algiers and wait out the night. There they meet two white party girls, a veteran, Greene (a terrific Anthony Mackie), and a provocateur, Carl (Jason Mitchell), who plays around with a starter pistol that eventually catches the attention of the police in the area. The officers, who we've already learned are rotten, storm the motel on the hunt for the sniper they presume is there. 
 
 The local police, led by a maniacal, hotheaded racist, Krauss (played by the English actor Will Poulter), kills Carl immediately and then continue to terrorize the guests relentlessly with inhuman torture tactics in what seems like an endless sequence of horror upon horror until two more end up dead and they call it a night. 
 
 Bigelow collaborated again with screenwriter Mark Boal on "Detroit," which is perfectly evocative of this specific time and place, but lacking the perspective and illumination that one might hope a 50-year-old event would warrant. Perhaps they wanted to leave conclusions and interpreting to the audience, and as the film notes at the end, no one knows for certain what happened in the Algiers Motel and some of the scenes were pieced together and imagined by the filmmakers. 
 
 There is some nuance — in the National Guard officer who is horrified by the situation and the local security officer (John Boyega) who only wanted to ease tensions — but not nearly as much as Bigelow and Boal have previously achieved in "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Hurt Locker." 
 
 Also very little insight is given to the victims' lives outside of this event. Maybe that's not the point, though. Maybe anger is all you're supposed to feel when you step outside the theater. Maybe not feeling satisfied with "Detroit" is the point. 
 
 This was America, you think. This is still America. And the movies can't offer a resolution that history hasn't. 
 
 "Detroit," an Annapurna Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "strong violence and pervasive language." Running time: 143 minutes. Three stars out of four. 
 
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 MPAA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. 
 
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 Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr ||||| In Harrowing 'Detroit,' Kathryn Bigelow Mixes Brutal Facts With Fiction 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Francois Duhamel/Annapurna Francois Duhamel/Annapurna 
 
 Twenty-two years ago, Kathryn Bigelow made Strange Days — a paranoid thriller written and produced by her former spouse James Cameron, set in the then-future of 1999. Inspired in part by the 1992 Los Angeles riots — which were sparked by the acquittal of the LAPD officers who'd beaten Rodney King near to death — the movie's plot involved the murder of black hip-hop artist "Jeriko One" by a pair of white Los Angeles cops. 
 
 As ambitious as it was unwieldy, Strange Days flopped so hard that Bigelow's career took years to recover. But she landed on her feet, becoming the first and so far only woman to win the Academy Award for best director, for the Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, which also won best picture. Her follow-up, Zero Dark Thirty, got a Best Picture nod, too. And that's how a sexagenarian woman in Hollywood earns the juice to make a movie like the incendiary new Detroit — Bigelow's vivid, inevitably divisive reenactment of a real 1967 incident wherein three Motor City police officers were charged in the killings of three adolescent black men while the city was under martial law following riots. 
 
 Seemingly in a position to make any movie she wanted, she chose a lightly fictionalized historical drama that bares a striking resemblance to her little-seen Angela Bassett-starring sci-fi flick from 1995. (Strange Days even climaxes in a riot touched off by white police using excessive force on a black suspect, which is where Detroit begins.) 
 
 Until now, the highest-profile accounting of what happened that night was John Hersey's 1968 book The Algiers Motel Incident. (Hersey's estate declined to sell Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal the rights, The New York Times reported.) Detroit isn't as dispassionate as that. Just as the movie Hidden Figures buffed and polished the story told in the eponymous nonfiction book for maximum uplift, Detroit heats and sharpens the facts that formed it for maximum outrage. 
 
 Not that those facts weren't outrageous already: In the case Detroit revisits, the cops were acquitted after the confessions they gave and then recanted were ruled inadmissible in court. That's a cruel irony, because it was in their attempt to coerce confessions from the young men they'd confined in Detroit's Algiers Motel — a $6-a-night flophouse that the law considered a den of sin —that those out-of-control cops resorted to intimidation, torture, and finally murder. (The presence of two white girls from Ohio among all those black men appeared to inflame the cops' further — they accused the women of prostitution, stripping and beating them.) The police claimed a sniper had fired upon them from inside the motel, but they never recovered a rifle from the scene. Detroit subscribes to accounts from several witnesses that the shots that summoned the police came from a starter pistol fired first as a stupid prank, then as an impotent and costly gesture of defiance. Carl Cooper, the 17-year-old who'd allegedly fired it, was the first to die that night. 
 
 One of the witnesses who testified for the prosecution, and who said he was assaulted by the accused policemen himself at the Algiers, was a musician. Singer Larry Reed quit his vocal group The Dramatics after that hellish night in 1967; the group broke out a few years later and had a long career without him. (They're still touring.) Reed was one of the incident's key figures that frequent Bigelow collaborator Boal interviewed while working on the movie. And though Boal's research team included Pulitzer Prize-winning Detroit Free Press reporter David Zeman, he has used his artistic license to plug some gaps in the legal record. (Other limits on the film's authenticity were merely budgetary, like the fact that tax incentives resulted in most of Detroit being filmed on location in... Boston.) 
 
 Boal's script commingles real and fictional people: Real-life witnesses Melvin Dismukes, Julie Hysell, and Larry Reed (played onscreen by John Boyega, Hannah Murray, and Algee Smith, respectively), are represented, but the brutal cops in the movie have different names than the officers who were eventually acquitted of the Algiers Motel killings. Their ringleader is played by Will Poulter, a redheaded, freckled 24-year-old English actor whose permanently right-angled eyebrows make him look like the satanic cousin of MAD magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. "We've failed these people," he says early in the film, sounding like a peace-loving Hubert Humphrey voter moments before he fatally shoots one of "these people" in the back on suspicion of stealing groceries. A detective tells him he's recommending that the District Attorney file murder charges against him, but Poulter's character is sent right back out to active duty in the meantime. Did this really happen? Well, there was a riot on. 
 
 Other credulity-straining aspects of Detroit appear to be factual: For one thing, Dismukes, a private security guard called in to protect a store near the Algiers from looters, was allowed to enter the Algiers with a weird coalition of Detroit cops and National Guardsmen and remain at a crime scene for hours while trying, ineffectually, to prevent the cops from brutalizing their suspects. (Boyega radiates Denzel-like calm in the face of the storm, proving that the way he livened the The Force Awakens was no fluke — he's a bonafide movie star. And to see him in a role where he's essentially helpless is unusual, and compelling.) In real life, Dismukes was charged with the felonious assault of two of the suspects and tried before any of the three cops accused of more serious offenses were; an all-white jury acquitted him. To the extent Detroit addresses this, it implies an unsuccessful attempt by the police to frame Dismukes for their own wrongdoing. 
 
 I'm also curious to know whether another one of its plot points is historical or invented: When Michigan State Police arrive at the Algiers, the ranking officer among them decides he wants no part of the "civil rights mix-up" the Detroit P.D. has already created, so the state troopers just drive away. What's the expression? Huge if true. 
 
 Bigelow and Boal's recreation of a 50-year-old police brutality case seems bound to be as controversial as their last project, 2012's Zero Dark Thirty. Accused in some quarters of defending the C.I.A.'s use of torture in its decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty was really more of a high-tone Rorshach blot for each viewer's opinion of the endless War on Terror. Bigelow has always gone for immersion before reflection or judgment. 
 
 "I don't think it's up to the filmmaker to judge," the director told Washington Post chief film critic Ann Hornaday in a profile published last week. And it's not as though she's only just become interested in identity politics or policing: Long before her metamorphosis into an Oscar-winning maker of Important Films, she made 1990's Blue Steel, a sordid thriller that starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie patrol officer who comes under suspicion after she kills a robbery suspect whose weapon can't be found. It's not a particularly good movie, nor one that would remotely satisfy any 2017 test of its wokeness, but it is at least more evidence that Bigelow was thinking about the problems of policing even when she was just making pulp films. 
 
 Bigelow's quasi-journalistic style has long alienated some viewers; now it's infuriating them, too. Chicago critic Angelica Jade Bastien slammed Detroit as "soulless," claiming it isn't harsh enough in its condemnation of the misconduct it depicts so mercilessly. Some of her specific complaints about Boal's screenplay — that it makes Melvin Dismukes "too passive a character," or that "there are also brief, disconcerting moments that present some white cops in a great light" — come from the moments where Boal hews closest to the firsthand accounts Dismukes and Reed shared with him. Dismukes says he did all he could to prevent the bloodshed, which wasn't much, and Reed says that after he fled the Algiers he was picked up and taken to the hospital by a cop—one who wasn't involved in the nightmare at the hotel. Molding facts into the emotional construct we refer to when use the word story is messy work, even when it's done in good faith. 
 
 I've seen Detroit only once, but I'm of the option that Bigelow and Boal have done that good but messy work, resulting in a movie that is maddeningly imperfect but still honorable. The movie opens with a semi-animated sequence that fashions Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series" of paintings into a primer on the mass movement of African-Americans from the rural south to the urban north and west after World War I, and the subsequent white flight to the suburbs. That meant that by the 1960s, Detroit was a majority-black city with a majority-white police force. 
 
 It's to Bigelow's credit that she doesn't survey the worlds in which she sets her movies in schematic screenwriting terms: Detroit's early scenes, wherein a police raid on an unlicensed nightclub that's hosting a party for returning veterans sparks a riot, includes a few left turns — one of the black party guests who mouths off to the "pigs" turns out to be a narc, for example. This detail serves no narrative purpose; it only serves to underscore the absence of trust between the police and the citizens they're sworn to protect and serve. Editor Billy Goldenberg splices in documentary footage with the newly-shot material in this section of the movie, creating a panorama of the climate of mortal fear and volcanic anger between the citizens and the police. 
 
 We begin to get our bearings when Reed (Algee Smith) and The Dramatics prepare to perform on a revue at the Fox Theatre where they know a Motown A&R; scout will be in the audience. When the police order the performance stopped and the Fox evacuated, and then their bus home is set upon by rioters, Reed and his friend Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) make the ill-fated decision to wait out the curfew poolside at the Algiers. 
 
 The police occupation of the Algiers forms the film's harrowing, quite long centerpiece. Bigelow uses all her gifts as a communicator of visceral sensation to summon the horror of spending a night under these vicious cops' bootheels. It's nauseating. By the time Anthony Mackie — playing an out-of-work Vietnam vet who gets thanked for his service by being beaten and spat on by cops — agrees never to speak of what he's witnessed, Bigelow and Boal have said all they have to say. 
 
 But Detroit continues on to depict the trial of the three officers, leaking tension as it does. If the intent of this section of the film is to illustrate that these cops are not bad apples but rather the functioning-as-designed armature of an inherently racist justice system, it's only partially successful. The tactics their lawyer (John Krasinski, weirdly) uses to discredit the prosecution's witnesses are as familiar as the Algiers scenes are revolting, and our rage circuits have already blown. 
 
 Maybe it's just impossible for even a scene-setter as skilled as Bigelow to do anything new in a courtroom. The coda she chooses, showing Larry Reed's resolution to continue his musical career in a far more modest fashion than before, has nothing to do with consoling the audience after 135 minutes of trauma. It's about Reed becoming a militant for peace. It's about him making a choice to survive. If nothing else, Detroit gets you thinking about how those might be the same thing. ||||| It focuses on a notorious act of white police brutality against mostly Black citizens, in a July 1967, siege at the Motor City’s Algiers Motel, where racism met frustration and blood was wantonly shed. Three young Black men were left dead and many questions were left unanswered. The mostly white Detroit Police Department emerged officially exonerated but not blameless. 
 
 The incident is set against the larger story of the Detroit riots of the same year, which left 43 people dead, nearly 1,200 injured and 7,200 arrested, as the National Guard along with city and state police combined to enforce law and order in a city literally burning from racial tensions. 
 
 No one would accuse the cops in Detroit of being “too nice,” although Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal — who previously teamed for Zero Dark Thirty and Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker — are careful not to demonize every authority figure. Many of the police and soldiers in the film are appalled by the acts of racism and violence they’re witnessing, among them the commanding officer of trigger-happy young patrol officer Philip Krauss, who is played by cherry-cheeked Will Poulter (The Revenant). 
 
 Despite civil-rights advances and eight years of an African-American U.S. president, the colour of a person’s skin can still determine everything from employment opportunities to treatment by police — who were recently encouraged by President Donald Trump to “please don’t be too nice” when dealing with crime suspects, wink, wink. 
 
 The injustice and anger behind it all feels like current reality, even a half-century on, making Detroit urgent viewing regardless of its character-development flaws. 
 
 Being appalled, however, isn’t the same as taking full ownership. The commander severely reprimands Krauss for fatally shooting a fleeing looter. He then allows the unrepentant patrolman to return to the streets. 
 
 Krauss later becomes the central antagonist of the Algiers Motel siege, which is sparked by a teen’s reckless firing of a starter’s pistol at a passing group of National Guardsmen. As cops and soldiers converge on the seedy establishment, seeking the sniper they believe hides inside, fate has also drawn in multiple unlucky bystanders, who thought they’d escaped the riots. 
 
 Among them are rising R&B singer Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and his friend Fred Simple (Jacob Latimore); private security guard Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega); a Vietnam vet named Greene (Anthony Mackie); and two white visitors from Ohio (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever), who picked a bad time and place to party. 
 
 That’s a lot of characters, and there are more, and here you have the central deficiency of Boal’s script: it tries to tell us everything about the circumstances without telling us much about the people. The film is less a character study and more of a situational one; a post-script notes that the Algiers Motel incident has never been fully explained. 
 
 Detroit opens with a roughly animated history lesson about how poor southern Blacks moved to white-dominated northern cities while affluent whites fled to the suburbs, taking the best jobs with them. The resulting powder keg of inequities exploded not just in Detroit, but across America. 
 
 And it led to situations like the motel standoff, which Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd powerfully depict cinéma vérité style as a cascading series of bad choices, evil intentions and escalating violence. 
 
 Krauss and his fellow racist cops torture the rounded-up motel guests by beating them and threatening to shoot them one by one until the identity of the alleged sniper is disclosed. 
 
 Watching it unfold over the bulk of the film’s 143-minute running time makes for a grim sit, made all the more so by James Newton Howard’s minimalist score, which at times disappears altogether. Bigelow deserves credit for not trivializing the drama with a soundtrack packed with driving Motown tunes, although a version of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere To Run” is briefly heard in the film at one point. 
 
 You don’t need a big backbeat to drive images like these home; Detroit’s deep fury and essential message sears the eye and brain. ||||| If there were a criminal charge for Grand Theft Feature Film, Oscar Isaac would be facing a long, long sentence. He pops up for a couple of scenes as an insurance investigator halfway through “Suburbicon,” evolves on the spot from mild patience to testy suspicion followed by snide cynicism, then departs with the movie stolen and stuffed into his back pocket. 
 
 In a film running a brief 104 minutes, he supplies 90 percent of the entertainment in 5 percent of the time. As for the rest of the project, we’ll get to that. Let’s take a moment first to count our blessings. 
 
 Retrofitted on the scaffolding of an old script by Joel and Ethan Coen, “Suburbicon” is a vision of 1950s-era Americana set in a hopeful, wholesome suburban community where everything looks absolutely peachy keen. (Spoiler: It’s not.) It features the Coens’ patented mix-and-match blend of shaggy dog humor and bloody violence, along with a high-minded subplot that aims to give the story contemporary relevance. Featuring Matt Damon and Julianne Moore as the lead actors and George Clooney as director, it’s star-studded top to bottom. 
 
 And it’s strikingly bad, too somber to be a comedy and too dizzy to work as drama. 
 
 An animated opening sequence introduces us to Suburbicon, an oddly named neighborhood where every new Eisenhower-era home looks like the one next door. Those cookie-cutter developments, made famous by the legendary Levittown, Pa., development of single-family tract houses, promised the returning veterans of World War II affordable tranquillity away from the pollution, noise and crime of the big city. 
 
 A happy mailman (this is back when they were still called mailmen) demonstrates how cheery life is in Suburbicon. He smiles at every door — until he meets the newest residents, the hamlet’s only black family. He steps back with a forced, frozen smile and bids them farewell in a textbook case of passive aggression. 
 
 Suburbicon ★ out of 4 stars Rating: R for violence, language and some sexuality. 
 
 This is pretty accurate. By 1953, Levittown constituted the largest racially restricted community in the United States, with 70,000 people and no black residents. The policy of racial exclusivity came from the developers and remained in place until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional more than a decade later. 
 
 That being said, however, it matters not if the back story is true. A Coenesque crime comedy is an awkward venue for exploring weighty social issues, and it’s hard to watch this misbegotten farce without wishing that Clooney and collaborator Grant Heslov (who has assisted on the scripts of other Clooney projects, including “The Monuments Men” and “Good Night, and Good Luck”) had decided to focus exclusively on the caper or the commentary. 
 
 The film is a collision of tones that would put a demolition derby to shame. Damon plays Gardner Lodge, a plain vanilla 1950s father with a secret life who is going through a midlife crisis and then some. His wife (Moore, who also plays the woman’s twin) is murdered. Their young son Nicky (Noah Jupe) gets even more traumatized when he concludes that his father and aunt (Moore again) are hiding something about the homicide. As usual in the Coen world, the best laid plans of imbeciles go awry, and characters are soon beating, stabbing, poisoning and killing one another in car crashes. 
 
 As distressing as this all sounds, it’s the kind of foul play the Coens could turn to zany fun in their own film. But in Clooney’s hands (remember “Leatherheads” or “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”?), it’s even worse than it sounds. 
 
 Yet, it’s the disconnected subplot about the suburb’s new black residents, menaced by mobs at their home, right across from the Lodge residence, that seems like the biggest strategic error. Both sides of the film lift up a rock to expose the wormy things crawling beneath, neither in a way that’s dramatically effective. 
 
 Fortunately, we’ve still got Isaac (the title character in the Coens’ “Inside Llewyn Davis”) as the hilarious investigator. They’ll never take that away from us. 
 
 Colin.Covert@startribune.com 
 
 612-673-7186 
 
 Twitter: @colincovert
– Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit tells the story of a black singer who takes refuge in a dingy motel to escape the 1967 Motor City riots. Based on real events, the film reunites Bigelow with screenwriter Mark Boal, both of the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker. It's got a strong 89% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what critics are saying: "Bigelow drills down into one of American history's most egregious cases of abuse of police power, bringing it to life with visceral detail and slowed-down meticulousness" in what "feels like her timeliest movie yet," writes Ann Hornaday at the Washington Post. It's "daring, sophisticated and unforgettably disturbing." And "in scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it's nothing less than monumental." "It's hard to overstate just how visceral and harrowing an experience it is," writes Lindsey Bahr at the AP, calling Detroit "a well-made and evocative film" jam-packed with "stomach-churning horror." She argues there could be more nuance and perspective. But "maybe anger is all you're supposed to feel when you step outside the theater. Maybe not feeling satisfied with Detroit is the point." Chris Klimek says Detroit is "maddeningly imperfect but still honorable," citing "lightly fictionalized" aspects of the otherwise true story that set it up "for maximum outrage." This is "messy work, even when it’s done in good faith," he writes at NPR. He applauds John Boyega, previously of The Force Awakens. Radiating a "Denzel-like calm," he shows "he's a bonafide movie star," Klimek writes. Peter Howell's main gripe is that the film "tries to tell us everything about the circumstances without telling us much about the people." But Detroit still makes for "urgent viewing," he writes at the Toronto Star. Why? "The injustice and anger behind it all feels like current reality, even a half-century on," when "a person's skin can still determine everything from employment opportunities to treatment by police."