The Utter Storytelling Perfection of Sinners

For Authors

There are some stories that stay with you long after they end, not because of their plot twists or spectacle, but because they make you feel something real. A recent example of this is the movie Sinners, which at first glance seems like a very specific story rooted in a particular time, place, and cultural experience. Yet somehow it reaches far beyond that, connecting with audiences who have no direct link to the world it portrays.

According to Ginger, that tension between specificity and universality is what makes great storytelling work, and Sinners is a powerful example of it in action. In this week’s post, he takes a closer look at how the story achieves this so that the rest of us can apply those same principles to our own writing. From building characters with depth beneath the surface to trusting readers enough to not overexplain, Ginger explores the craft decisions that turn a good story into one readers will not soon forget.

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I was somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home from France, when I first watched the Academy Award winning movie Sinners and I immediately knew I had to write an article about what Ryan Coogler’s masterpiece can teach self-published authors about the craft of storytelling.

The movie blew me away. Somewhere between the wine I’d had with dinner and the hum of the plane engine, this horror movie musical reached deep inside of me and something took hold. By the time the credits rolled, I’d cried twice, laughed out loud once, and sat in the strange, trembling silence that only the very best stories leave behind.

(I probably distressed the poor woman sitting next to me.)

As an immigrant to America—someone who came to this country carrying my own versions of ambition and grief and the desperate hope that the “Land of the Free” might make room for me—I saw myself reflected in a story that was very specifically not written for me. 

But that right there is the mark of transcendent storytelling, and it’s the single greatest lesson any of us who write fiction can learn.

(Before we go further: if you haven’t seen Sinners, stop reading and go watch it. Spoilers follow!)

The Man Behind the Movie

Ryan Coogler is, by any measure, one of the most important filmmakers working today. Born and raised in Oakland, California, he announced himself to the world with Fruitvale Station in 2013, a devastating true-story drama that demonstrated his gift for finding the profound inside the ordinary. 

Then came the Rocky sequel Creed in 2015, Marvel’s Black Panther in 2018 and the 2022 sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. What’s remarkable about all of those movies was that every one of them was written with Michael B. Jordan in the lead role, a collaboration that speaks to the kind of deep creative trust most of us spend careers chasing. 

(I’d argue that Jordan is to Ryan Coogler what Leonardo di Caprio is to Martin Scorsese, or Harrison Ford is to Steven Spielberg.) 

However, Sinners is different from everything that came before it. First off, it’s Coogler’s first major original screenplay—not an adaptation, not a franchise entry, and not based on a true story. It’s the kind of movie you only get to make when you’ve earned the right to take a swinging, terrifying, glorious creative risk, and Coogler has earned that right with spectacular authority.

Secondly, it’s a universally acknowledged masterpiece, receiving a record-setting 16 Academy Award nominations and winning four of them, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan.

Coogler himself described making Sinners as “renewing his vows to cinema” and as a creative person, I feel every word of that promise in every frame.

A Dan Harmon Circle in the Mississippi Delta

Sinners is set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta during the era of Jim Crow, a dark period of American history during which Southern states enforced a brutal system of racial segregation through law and terror, with separate schools, separate water fountains, separate entrances, and a constant, codified humiliation designed to keep Black Americans as second-class citizens. 

Our main characters are twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played brilliantly by Michael B. Jordan. They’re returning to their Mississippi hometown of Clarksdale after years spent in Chicago’s criminal underworld, bringing with them money, ambition, and deep emotional scars. 

The brothers plan to open a “juke joint”—a place of music, community, and something like joy specifically created for the Black community of Clarksdale. That dream is what Dan Harmon’s Story Circle might call the ordinary world crossed with the call to adventure.

One of the reasons the movie is so good is because it follows a beautifully crafted story structure. I’ve broken it down into Dan Harmon’s Story Circle because that’s my favorite storytelling tool, but you could equally break the structure of the movie into Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey or the traditional Three-Act Structure. The fact that the story is so rigidly structured isn’t a criticism, to me it’s proof that Cooglar is a master of his craft.

In terms of the story circle, here’s how it breaks down:

1. You (the ordinary world): The twins are men of the world, hardened and capable. But home pulls them back. Clarksdale is where they’re from. It’s where the blues live.

2. Need (something is wrong or missing): They need to belong somewhere, to build something that’s theirs. Not a hustle for someone else, but a home. Smoke carries the additional weight of a secret daughter and a love left behind. Smoke carries wounds from the war, both literal and psychological, that he can’t put into words.

3. Go (cross the threshold): They open the juke joint. They invite their cousin Sammie, a prodigiously gifted young blues musician, to play there. The night begins.

4. Search (road of trials): The night starts to crack. A mysterious Irish stranger named Remmick arrives at the door. The music swells. Something supernatural stirs, and then the vampire siege begins.

5. Find (the ordeal): The community is trapped. Friends become monsters. Sammie’s music, so pure it can “pierce the veil between life and death, past and future,” is what drew the vampires to them in the first place.

6. Take (seize the sword): The survivors fight back, using everything available—fire, faith, music, and the fierce will to not be consumed both body and soul.

7. Return (the road back): At extraordinary cost, Smoke survives. He makes a devastating choice to protect Sammie’s future, even at the price of his own.

8. Change (return with the elixir): In the extraordinary post-credits sequence (set in the 1990s) we learn that Sammie kept playing the blues even after the traumatic experience of that fateful night. The music survived. The story survived. Something essential was passed forward to a new generation.

This is the story circle in its most mythic and fully realized form, but Coogler doesn’t just use this structure. He fills it with so much human truth that the scaffolding becomes invisible.

The Characters and Their Arcs

A great story is important, but the greatest stories are driven by the characters who create them, and the cast of Sinners is replete with richly nuanced and believable characters who relentlessly drive the narrative forward.

Smoke is the twin who stayed the most grounded in his roots, and the most wounded. One of the film’s quietest and most devastating details is his inability to roll a cigarette due to his shaky hands. It’s never explained in dialogue. It doesn’t need to be. Any viewer who has spent time around veterans, or who knows what PTSD looks like in a body, understands immediately. This is the iceberg theory in action—what Hemingway called the dignity of movement of an iceberg, which is due to the fact that only one-eighth of it is above water. Smoke’s trembling hands are that one-eighth. We feel the seven-eighths subconsciously.

Sammie is the story’s beating heart, a young man who doesn’t yet understand the magnitude of what lives inside him. His musical gift is so real, so ancient, and so connected to something beyond the ordinary world that it becomes both his salvation and his curse. He is, in story terms, the inciting object—the thing everyone wants to possess or protect. His arc is the classic hero’s emergence as a boy who starts the night uncertain of his worth and ends it understanding, at terrible cost, that the power of his music is truly worth dying for.

Mary, played by the beautiful Hailee Steinfeld, carries one of the film’s two central love stories, but it’s not the explosive, consuming kind of love, but the quiet, enduring, heartbreaking kind. She loved Stack before Chicago. She still loves him when he returns. Her arc is about the dignity of waiting for something that may never come, and how the moment she finally stops waiting is the moment it becomes too late for either of them.

Remmick, played by Jack O’Connell, is the film’s central antagonist, albiet a complex one. He might be the leader of the vampires, but Remmick isn’t simply a monster. He’s an Irish immigrant to America in a time when the Irish were treated almost as badly as Black people. As such, Remmick is another outsider, another person displaced by history and poverty and empire. His vampirism is explicitly coded as a kind of colonialism, the eternal hunger of one culture to consume another, to take its music, its soul, its vitality, and call it your own. The fact that Remmick is Irish is not accidental. The Irish were themselves colonized by the British, and vilified by many Americans before they eventually became viewed as “the colonizers” themselves because of the color of their skin. In Sinners, Remmick may intend to feed on Black culture—on its music, its energy, its joy—but only because he’s been starved of these things for so long that he’s forgotten, as a vampire, that they never belonged to him in the first place.

The Iceberg: What Lives Below the Surface

Beyond Smoke’s shaking hands, the reason the characterization in Sinners is so strong is because Coogler leaned very heavily into the “Iceberg method.” Consider:

Smoke’s daughter. She appears briefly, wordlessly almost, and yet she is the weight Smoke carries throughout every scene of the movie. His failure to be present for her is never lectured to us. It’s just something that’s there. In the lines of Jordan’s face, in the way Smoke’s eyes go somewhere private when children appear in the frame, and in how powerful the final scenes of the movie are when he’s eventually reunited with Annie and his daughter.

Remmick’s backstory. His Irishness is the film’s most quietly devastating metaphor. As a vampire, he’s the antagonist of the movie. Yet as the man who was taken over by the vampire, Remmick understands hunger and displacement and what it means to be deemed less than human because of his peoples’ traumatic past. Yet here he is, feeding on others, showcasing the cycle of oppression that Coogler’s vampires are meant to represent.

Grace Chow during “I Lied to You.” Although Sinners is an undeniably Black movie, it’s also an American movie, and one way this is demonstrated is through the characters of Bo and Grace Chow, who are Chinese Americans and exist on a bridge between the white and Black communities of Clarksdale. They represent all immigrants to this country, and my single favorite moment from the film is when the camera follows Grace during the great central musical sequence that serves as the “inciting incident” in the movie. As Sammie sings “I Lied to You” the whole juke joint erupts into transcendent, veil-piercing music and dance, and the camera follows Grace as she works the event, clearing glasses and moving through the crowd. She’s been introduced as a tough, no-nonsense businesswoman, but when the music catches her, you can watch her fall under the spell of Sammie’s music in real time. We watch the shimmy in her shoulders and the involuntary sway of her hips and despite the fact that she’s supposed to be working, we witness her there, entirely, in the music. She can’t help it. Nobody can. That’s the magic at the center of the story and, as somebody who worked as a bartender on both sides of the Atlantic, an incredibly resonant scene which perfectly captures what it’s like to lose yourself in the flow of a good time. 

This moment is what another of my favorite movies was built around, Pixar’s Soul. That featured the idea of “the zone” of flow—those moments when something larger than us reaches through our creativity and claims us completely. 

In Sinners, that experience is both literal and metaphysical. Sammie’s music literally pierces the veil between this world and the next. But it’s Grace’s unscripted shimmy that demonstrates the human version of this magic. You don’t choose it. It chooses you. 

As a creative person, that idea—that art can reach inside us regardless of who we are, where we come from, or what we’re supposed to be doing in that moment—is the very thing I return to again and again. You probably feel the same way. Chasing that flow state is why we make things. It’s why we tell stories. It’s the moment when we tap into something ancient, forever, and infinitely larger than ourselves.

Why This Movie Matters Right Now

Beyond the power of its story and the richness of its characters, Sinners exists in a specific, urgent political moment. The Trump regime that’s currently in charge of our government has expended a huge amount of energy in systematically attempting to erase Black history from American public life. 

An executive order signed in March 2025, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” targeted the Smithsonian Institution directly, empowering Vice President Vance to review and purge what the administration called “improper ideology.” 

What was this so-called ideology? The National Museum of African American History and Culture—a breathtaking institution that tells the story of the people who built this country in chains—had artifacts returned to their lenders, including the original 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter from the Greensboro sit-ins, one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. Web pages about Jackie Robinson’s military service were briefly scrubbed from Pentagon websites. A memorial to enslaved people at the President’s House in Philadelphia—documenting the nine people George Washington held in bondage while serving as the nation’s first president—faced court battles to prevent its removal. The Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House was demolished. Free entry to national parks on Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day were quietly ended.

This is not a partisan footnote. It’s context. When the government moves to erase a people’s history, art becomes the archive. Film becomes testimony. A movie like Sinners—set in the Delta in 1932 and steeped in the blues and the terror of Jim Crow—insists loudly that the Black American experience is not a footnote but the very marrow of this country. The movie is, in this moment, an act of preservation. The Congressional Black Caucus said it plainly: “Black history is American history.” Sinners says it in music, fire, and gallons of blood.

As an immigrant, I feel this in my bones. The version of America that made room for me is the version built on the full, complicated, gorgeous, terrible truth of what this country is. Not a sanitized myth. The blues didn’t come from nowhere. That music came from suffering, survival, and the sheer human insistence on beauty even in conditions designed to crush it. That is the American spirit, in all its true complexity, and that’s exactly what makes Sinners so powerful.

The Catharsis of the Final Act

After the film’s bloody climax, the horror pivots into something else, something primal and cathartically satisfying in the way only fiction can be. After the film that has made us feel the weight of Jim Crow in every conversation, every glance, and every act of casual dehumanization absorbed without comment by the Black characters, we get to see Smoke confront the true villains of the movie. Not the vampires, but the Ku Klux Klansmen who (we learn) had secretly planned to slaughter all who attended the juke joint.

To see Michael B. Jordan slaughter these racists with a variety of iconic American weaponry (Colt 1911 pistols, a Browning Automatic Rifle, and the classic Thompson submachine gun) provides an emotional release that hits with startling force. It’s the physical manifestation of an evil that was always there, and that is, in many ways, more horrific than the vampires could ever be.

Coogler doesn’t let us off easily. The catharsis is earned, not given. People we love are gone. The joy of the juke joint’s opening night feels like something from another world. But the fight continues, and there’s something deeply, specifically American about the victims of oppression refusing to be erased.

The Post-Credits Sequence: A Gift

And then, after all that, Ryan Cooglar manages to reward his audience with one more gift.

In a post credit sequences, we flash forward to the 1990s. 

Sammie, the only survivor of the massacre, still plays the blues. The music survived. Everything the vampires and the Klan tried to consume or destroy—the culture, soul, and the living thread of the blues—has found its way forward through time through the calloused fingers of this scarred old man. 

When Stack and Mary confront Sammie again, it’s a quiet, devastating, beautiful sequence, and it reframes everything we’ve watched before it. The story was never only about one terrible night. It was about what outlasts terrible nights. It was about what gets passed down. As a storyteller, I literally wept as Sammie explained that before everything went wrong, the night of the juke joint massacre had been the best day of his life.

What This Means for Us

Sinners will be remembered as one of the most significant American films of the 21st century. Not because it had a record number of Oscar nominations (although it did.) Not because it made a ton of money (although it did, nearly $370 million worldwide.) 

The movie will be remembered because it did what the greatest stories have always done. It made people feel something true about being human. 

Sinners made a Chinese American shimmy involuntarily in a Mississippi juke joint. It made Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld lose themselves in the rhythm of an Irish jig. But it also made an impact beyond what the characters did onscreen.

It made an immigrant from another country entirely—me, on a plane over the Atlantic—see himself reflected in the faces of people whose history he had no direct claim to, and understand something new about a country he’s chosen to call home for over twenty years.

But that is the privilege and the responsibility of storytelling. Whether you’re Ryan Coogler or just a modest romance author like me, we get to build worlds that are more honest than the official version. We get to put people on the page who are never in the room. Just like Sammie’s music does in Sinners, we get to pierce the veil between past and future with our writing, finding our own space between one person’s experience and that of another, and between what is and what could be.

Ryan Coogler sat down and wrote something true, strange, brave, and beautiful when he created Sinners. He didn’t hedge. He didn’t sand off the specificity to make it more “universal.” Instead, he went deeper into specificity, trusting that the more particular the truth, the more widely it resonates with people. 

And he was right.

For those of us who write our own fictional worlds, in whatever genre, and at whatever stage of our career, Sinners serves as both a reminder and a challenge. 

Cooglar teachers us to never write around the thing. Write toward it. Trust your reader the way Coogler trusts us, his audience. Build the iceberg. Let the music pierce the veil. As creators, we’re so lucky to get to do this, so don’t waste a word.

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