To the extent that I have a basic read on this film — on what it is trying to say — it is as follows:

People want to be free. They want to be able to live their lives as they see fit. They want to be able to build communities that sustain them. They want joy. They want love. They want peace.

Oppression makes this difficult, and a system as oppressive, violent and absurd as Jim Crow makes it nearly impossible.…

Plenty of people smarter than me have written about how the movie embeds the message of the legend — what would we do, what would we sacrifice, to give ourselves a story worth telling — into the narrative itself.

I just want to say that I was struck by the preoccupation with death throughout the film. Death as an inevitability, death as something to respect, death as an opportunity for life, death as something that — if we are lucky — we…