Ryan Coogler slips a deliberate anachronism into an early scene of his new movie, Sinners. In 1932, on a back road near Clarksdale, Mississippi, two twins disagree over when they should open up their new juke joint. They’ve just bought a property from a shady good old boy, and Elijah “Smoke” Moore (Michael B. Jordan), brooding and cautious, wants to take a week to set it up. Smoke sports a watch and a newsboy cap, and he’s just as quick to cut a deal as he is to brandish a gun; he means business. The flamboyant and devil-may-care Elias “Stack” Moore (also played by Jordan), wearing a top hat and prone to showing off his gold teeth with a wide grin, points to the open Delta sky and tells his brother that their “For us, by us” nightclub was destined to come to life on such a beautiful day. Stack is the salesman, and his pitch, delivered with a downhome twang, wins his brother over: They move to open that night, setting into motion the bloody and bawdy story.

“For us, by us” is best remembered as the motto of FUBU, the hip-hop apparel company that exploded in the 1990s by branding Black consumerism as self-determination. But FUBU notoriously expanded too fast, diluted its cachet in pursuit of the bottom line, and lost its market share. The allusion foreshadows the Moore brothers’ ominous future and establishes the film’s winking mood. Sinners is full of such double meanings, using its Southern horror conceit to play with dualities both historical and mythical. It’s a period drama and a postmodern fantasy, a pulpy vampire tale and a grounded meditation on the horrors of Jim Crow, an ode to Sunday service and the nights of revelry that precede it. While Coogler doesn’t hit every note, Sinners sings.

The film is Coogler’s first wholly original work. He has previously directed or written adaptations and franchise fare, using familiar stories and properties to explore police brutality (Fruitvale Station), paternity and masculinity (Creed and Creed III), and Black power and nationhood (Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). The shared concern in all of these films is legacy: Coogler is drawn to the ways that experiences and powers are passed from the dead to the living and how people bear and harness that heritage for future generations. Vampires, with their transgressive hunger for flesh and obsession with progeny, prove to be a potent vehicle for Coogler’s fascination with bloodlines. Although he doesn’t quite reinvent the classic creature, and his ambition gets ahead of him, the world into which he unleashes his vampires is rich with tensions and history.

Sinners, which mostly transpires over the course of a single day, takes its time introducing its bloodsuckers. The first act follows the Moore twins as they gather the staff for the grand opening of their club. First up is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and preacher’s son who dreams of playing secular music. Before they pick him up, Sammie’s humming peacefully as he picks cotton at dawn. Then he goes home to get his guitar from the one-room church that’s headed by his father, Jedidiah (an underused but fiery Saul Williams). Jedidiah warns Sammie that the devil will follow him home one day, but Sammie drives off with his cousins. For him, Smoke and Stack represent the world beyond the Delta. After serving in World War I, the twins made their way to Chicago and amassed a small fortune in the world of organized crime. Their homecoming is prodigal, but Sammie wants to follow in their footsteps. Although they tell him that Chicago is just “Mississippi with tall buildings,” he’s determined to hang on to his guitar.

When the trio splits up to get everything in place to open up the juke joint, the story digs further into 1930s Delta society. Smoke heads to Clarksdale’s main drag, a segregated street of businesses, to visit a Chinese couple who own two general stores that cater to either side of the Jim Crow divide. Coogler skillfully illustrates the racial split by having the couple’s daughter cross the street from the Black shop to the other one to retrieve her mother, Grace (Li Jun Li)—a journey Smoke couldn’t have made without causing a scene. The passage is filmed in one shot that lays out the similarity of the two stores and the different clientele while also showing Smoke’s connection to the couple. He beams as he negotiates with Grace and recruits the couple to help with the opening; they are friends despite their different experiences of Jim Crow.

Then Smoke goes to the home of Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a hoodoo practitioner and an old flame. She’s in the middle of selling an occult concoction to a young girl when he shows up. Here we learn why Smoke clings to his guns and money: Despite her use of magic, Annie could not prevent the death of her and Smoke’s young child. But she gets him to admit he still wears the protective “mojo bag” she gave him—his faith in commerce isn’t so resolute.

Meanwhile, Stack and Sammie go to a segregated train station to recruit more musicians and spread the word about their club. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a wisecracking pianist and harmonicist, sees through Stack’s schemes but agrees to go along for the ride. They also run into Stack’s old lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a biracial woman who reluctantly passes as white and desperately wants to reconnect. But Stack fears violating the color line and shuns her despite their history.

In all of these interactions and locations, Coogler lays out the invisible rules of segregation and reveals the ways that Black people subvert them through music, magic, and found family. Sin, as experienced by people without power, is a means of surviving in a world regimented by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Rather than presenting the historical South as innately horrific, though, Coogler depicts it as a fraught home filled with trip wires and hazards. The motley crew that the twins assemble embodies the tragedies and triumphs of the region, tensions inherent to the blues music that soundtracks the movie.

The juke joint, which gets up and running after all these introductions, offers some refuge to the twins and their crew. A cavernous wooden building located on the outskirts of town, the space is the main setting of the story, and for a spell it’s a warm and homey place. The camera drinks in the ambient joy as Slim commands the piano keys and people stomp, sway, and cheer in response. In the film’s standout scene, the party really gets going when Sammie sings the blues so rapturously that he rips the veil between the living and dead and even opens a portal into the future. As Caton’s honeyed baritone leaps from the actor, the scene erupts into a pirouetting journey through time and space: The blues melts into other genres and a durag-wearing rock guitarist, twerking schoolgirls, C-walking Crips, a DJ, a breakdancer, and then traditional dancers and musicians from across Africa and Asia appear alongside the Delta sharecroppers. Music isn’t just a tool for survival in this sequence; it is the transmission of life.

Sammie’s performance attracts the deadly attention of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a banjo-playing Irish vampire who heard the singing and saw reality split. Remmick wants Sammie’s musical prowess for himself so he can commune with his dead family, but he’s denied entry into the juke joint on his first visit—he does not, after all, fall under the umbrella of “For us, by us.” But he schemes his way into the club anyway, exploiting the relationships established in the film’s first act. The infiltration underscores the fragility of the coalition that Smoke and Stack built to get the club up and running, especially Stack and Mary’s relationship. They aren’t just bitter exes: Stack, fearing they would be persecuted because she appears white, pushed her to marry a white man and left town promising he’d one day come back for her. When Mary is bitten and pursues Stack, it’s made clear they can be together only in death.

Remmick works like a devilish missionary, acquiring the memories and talents of the people he bites and using his ill-begotten knowledge to grow his flock (in a whimsical touch, he even gets his victims to dance an epic Irish jig). He sells this arrangement as a kindness, telling the juke-joint crew that the freedom he offers is more honest than that of Black enterprise, which the local Ku Klux Klan would never allow.

Eventually, the Moore brothers find themselves on opposite sides of the divide between the living and the dead and confront the vampire and his brood. But the final act muddles many of the film’s ideas. Remmick’s raid on the club is a bloody mess, a far cry from the choreographed and story-driven action of Coogler’s past work. Though he offers some charged images, including Remmick and his newly turned vampires reciting the Lord’s Prayer while dunking Sammie in water, and an armed stand in which one of the twins mows down Klansmen with a tommy gun, the musical set pieces are far more distinctive.

The film’s ideas about the spiritual power of the blues—for individuals and for groups—are undermined by its narrow ending. After surviving the night, Sammie escapes with his guitar and becomes a blues musician in Chicago, but his deliverance has no bearing on the Delta society that Coogler has painstakingly brought to life. There’s no sense of how the encounter with Remmick affected the friends and family of everyone who died, an omission that contradicts the sense of boundless community evoked by Sammie’s magical performance. How will his fellow sharecroppers deal with the retaliation that is likely to follow the mow-down of people in the Klan? What does secular music go on to mean for Sammie’s many siblings, whom he last sees in church? Despite its flaws, Sinners is still a feast of color and sound, of mixed genres, musical and cinematic. But the devil lies in the details.