★★★★☆

IT’S hard to deny the powerful gut-punch quality of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, her 10th as director and third collaboration with screenwriter Mark Boal following The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. But this is a film about a conflict closer to home for American society, a cinematic pressure cooker look at one fateful July evening during the 1967 Detroit riot.

Tensions have reached boiling point in the Michigan city between the heavy-footed police force and the black community. Rioting and looting have broken out all over the place and there’s a strict curfew put in place in a vain effort to calm things down.

While the National Guard is patrolling the city’s streets they hear gunshots from what they believe to be a rifle coming from the nearby Algiers Motel. The authorities then surround and forcefully enter the premises in order to root out the potential sniper.

In the motel is Motown musician Larry (Algee Smith), his friend Fred (Jacob Latimore) and war veteran Greene (Anthony Mackie), as well as several other black men and two young white woman, Julie (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever). It’s in the ensuing extended sequence where the film truly finds its feet as a piece of sweaty-palms, grit-your-teeth cinema that’s undeniably difficult but utterly essential viewing.

It features overbearing police officer Krauss (Will Poulter on terrifying, Oscar-worthy form) and his fellow officers Demens (Jack Reynor) and Flynn (Ben O’Toole) lining the residents against and facing the wall for “questioning”, unleashing a tirade of shocking bullying, harassment and mind games that escalates out of all control.

The closest thing we have to a protagonist is black security guard Dismukes (John Boyega) – although the film gives plenty time to many of its cast of characters so that any one of them could claim that title in different stages – who gets caught up in the events of the evening and is unable to quite comprehend what he’s witnessing.

The film has already proved controversial and the very fact we sit uncomfortably squirming in our seats shows that the film is achieving a massive goal that it clearly set out to do. Bigelow’s camera captures the reality of the heart-in-mouth situation with unflinching rawness, delivering a powerfully confrontational dramatisation of events boiled down to its essence in a sledgehammer of a centrepiece incident.

This gives the film much of its bracing intimacy and a feeling that you can’t escape its statements about institutional racism, abuse of power and the criminalisation and dehumanisation of African Americans as a group – it’s right up there on-screen in gut-wrenching clarity.

But at the same time the decision to narrow the focus down like that does conjure that niggling feeling that we’re not quite getting the bigger, citywide picture that might give us a better idea of the magnitude of what’s happening as a whole. The riot sequences early on feel like something of a nervous preamble to the main event, while the aftermath enters into familiar territory of courtroom drama even as it rumbles with the possibility of police accountability as catharsis for the injustices we’ve been witnessing.

Detroit is a film that doesn’t shake easy from the mind. And nor should it. It challenges head on, if not exactly in the most subtle of ways, themes that feel just as relevant now as they ever did. It’s a hefty elephant in the room of a film, impassioned and difficult and hard to get a handle on. It will leave you feeling distraught, frustrated, sad, empty, bewildered and enraged in equal measure. And it shouldn’t be any other way.