“By Any Means”

Fighting Fire with Fire.

Early on, By Any Means — directed by Elegance Bratton, loosely based on an apparently true story, and set amidst the roiling tumult of Mississippi in the mid-1960s — seems like a fairly typical historical retelling, albeit one that is nicely lit and nicely shot. But soon enough, this movie proves to be something far from typical, and eventually it emerges as a “great” film — easily the best American release of 2026 thus far. A powerhouse movie full of ambiguous resonances, it made me say “wow” to myself in the theater after the closing credits had finished rolling.

By Any Means owes a certain lineage to director Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, the 1988 film costarring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe that garnered seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. But in addition to making one of its two leading characters Black, By Any Means proves both funnier and darker, pushing the envelope that much further in its dangerousness and complexity. Somehow imagine a nihilistic, violent version of Green Book, the 2018 Best Picture recipient, and one might receive an idea of how By Any Means fits into a cinematic tradition while simultaneously twisting that tradition in perverse fashion. Indeed, the film is not original so much as it takes timeless dilemmas and explores them with uncompromising brutality and unflinching vividness, with a remarkable combination of squalor and stylization.

In Mississippi circa 1966, Blacks have finally been granted their constitutional voting rights thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which was merely enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1869). But the prospect of witnessing Blacks vote in mass is unacceptable to both the Ku Klux Klan and the local police. As a result, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, still led by J. Edgar Hoover, steps in, even though it seems quite clear that the agency’s white leadership is apathetic — or at least dispassionate — about racial justice and civic equality. Eventually, the FBI’s Mississippi office assigns a young Black agent, Wayne Strider (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to serve as the “handler” for an unofficial investigator who operates outside the law. That operator is actually Greg Scarpa, a Mob hitman from New York who avoids prosecution by doing dirty work for the FBI in Mississippi, employing extralegal means of attaining justice that the Bureau could never officially embrace.

Scarpa is played by Mark Wahlberg in a character turn worthy of an Oscar nomination. His clashes with Strider, an ostensibly by-the-book lawman struggling to retain a sense of rectitude and propriety, are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and on other occasions quite scary. Written by Sascha Penn (Creed II, 1992), By Any Means revels in racial humor and proves politically incorrect in a way rarely seen in a Hollywood movie these days. Indeed, it is a film that finds humor within the darkness, and make no mistake: By Any Means is ultimately a very dark, very somber and sobering movie. The picture explores how the relationship between the law and justice, between means and ends, between ideals and reality, becomes murky, problematic, and paradoxical. To the film’s credit, though, it refuses to indulge in exposition, leaving its discomfiting implications for the audience to sort through. The closest that it comes to a philosophical exchange occurs during a brief scene in a car where Wayne and Greg discuss Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Fittingly, the debate fizzles, providing no clear answers.

By Any Means is not an easily embraceable film, and it can prove uncomfortable to watch at times. There are no real heroes here, and to the extent that the FBI fulfills its mission, the whiffs of hypocrisy and deceit that come with its success prove unmistakable. What the movie offers is not a social remedy or recipe, but a bitter and brutal sense of reality that can deflate as much it can inspire. Shot with vivid contrasts and sometimes-shimmering light, the movie also features a somber jazz score composed and orchestrated by Terence Blanchard, who plays both trumpet and piano on the film’s soundtrack.

After one long, brutal fight scene between Wayne and Greg, the film finds Mark Wahlberg’s mouth quavering, and the effect seems real, like an authentic response rather than a fit of acting. One thinks of the famous theater critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw and his description of the famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse in 1895 when she once blushed on stage in a way that seemed to Shaw entirely natural, truthful, and spontaneous. Wahlberg’s quavering mouth seems similarly natural and truthful, spontaneous and powerful, and if one never expected to see Mark Wahlberg and Eleonora Duse cited in the same sentence for similarly authentic acting, that is a tribute to the unexpected excellence of By Any Means.