“You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.”

This is the stern admonishment that Jedidiah Moore, a 1930s Black preacher in Clarksdale, Mississippi, gives his son Sammie in the critically acclaimed film “Sinners.” It’s a warning leading to a central juncture in choosing a straight and narrow path or traveling down a broad, wide road laden with worldly temptations. Sammie, a musical prodigy with a golden blues voice and tantalizing fingers stringing a resonator guitar, feels that the church is restrictive and suffocates his creative expression in song. He soon faces an evil entity vying to wrest his artistic talents from the depths of his soul.

“Sinners'” director Ryan Coogler places blues music at the center of this Jim Crow terror narrative that is also a thought-provoking social commentary on racism and cultural appropriation that wades into a nefarious supernatural realm. In “Sinners,” Coogler takes us back to a place and time in the Deep South in which unsettling fear was rooted in the daily lives of Black Mississippians, who were at the mercy of unjust de jure segregation laws. Blacks were second-class citizens with no legal protections and little hope of a better future. Sammie labors as a sharecropper and envisions music as his way out of being trapped in a mundane and grueling life of hardship picking cotton.

Up-and-coming star Miles Caton passionately portrays Sammie’s aspirations. You intensely feel his longing for success and his relentless determination not to let his dreams become deferred. Sammie gets the opportunity he has been waiting for when his identical twin cousins, Smoke and Stack, return to Clarksdale after years of being away in Chicago working for notorious gangster Al Capone.

Smoke personifies a dangerous, pragmatic outlook on life, only trusting what his physical senses reveal and never hesitating to destroy or maim anyone who gets in his way. Stack is more laid back and charismatic but just as devious. Their cunning personalities are brilliantly depicted by Michael B. Jordan, who captures the subtle differences that make the twins a menacing tandem.

Smoke and Stack seek out Sammie to play in the juke joint they open in Clarksdale, while also calling on favors from others in the Black community.

I left my viewing of “Sinners” mainly thinking about Sammie’s character and his eventual choice to leave his father’s church. Saul Williams portrays Jedidiah as a strict figure who is overly protective of his son, but given the Southern era they were living in, Jedidiah’s fears are understandable. The church is depicted as a constricting space rather than a dwelling of liberation. This is unfortunately accurate regarding some congregations today, but in a church where musicians are pouring out of their souls what God has breathed into them, their talents are anointed to heal and unshackle heavy burdens. There are no limitations on their skills and inspiration. Smoke tells Sammie that he knew plenty of musicians but “never met a happy one.” While Sammie ends up very accomplished many years later in his music career, I wondered if he was truly content.