‘The Dutchman’ Review: André Holland Goes on a Psychosexual Dark Night of the Soul in Contemporary Spin on ’60s Race Play
André Holland continues his streak as one of the sharpest dramatic actors working today — and I’m not just talking about “Moonlight,” have you seen TV’s “The Knick”? — as a New York businessman in marital freefall in Andre Gaines’ “The Dutchman.” Gaines and co-writer Qasim Basir lift Amiri Baraka’s classic 1964 play out of its midcentury Civil Rights Movement context and transplant the text to present-day Manhattan, where Clay (Holland) is going mad over his wife Kaya’s (Zazie Beetz) recent admission of an infidelity.
So launches a dark night of the soul through the city that echoes “Eyes Wide Shut” — in which mysterious women also tempt a spiraling Tom Cruise over an evening after Nicole Kidman confesses to extramarital thoughts — and even “After Hours” with its magical realism and deus-ex-machina moments of utter (and intentional) absurdity. But Clay’s psychosexual and personal freefall does not land him at a Long Island orgy for the super rich. Instead, this successful-on-paper Black businessman is taunted by the amorous, sexually unctuous Lula (Kate Mara), a white stranger who knows way too many intimate details about him. Like the fact that he’s trying to grow a beard, and more of the sort of thoughts reserved for an internal running monologue, the things you think alone in the dark, lying in bed awake at night.
“The Dutchman” trips up on a few too many self-aware reflexes, such as how Clay’s therapist, Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson), hands him a copy of Baraka’s play on which this movie is based as a sort of self-help text. But Holland’s arresting and understated performance as an increasingly helpless man overwhelmed by a possibly imaginary woman’s sexual wiles — and by his own place in the universe as a Black man on a corporate, white-laid track to no place fulfilling — makes “The Dutchman” a hypnotic watch.
Baraka wrote the play “Dutchman” the year before Malcolm X was killed in 1965, and it was made into a controversial sharp shock of a British indie starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. two years after the civil rights leader’s death. The original text centered on a white woman, also named Lula, who confronts and mocks a Black man in a New York City subway car. There, Clay was a symbol of Black male identity in shifting times and of how white women degrade and debase Black men in turning them into exotic sexual objects.
Gaines directs his first narrative feature after documentaries on baseball icon Jackie Robinson, Olympic athlete Jesse Owens, and comedian Dick Gregory, here expanding Baraka’s two-scene two-hander (which premiered in Greenwich Village) to include the other people exerting pressure onto Clay’s orbit. “The Dutchman” the movie begins during a tense couple’s counseling session, with Kaya laying out her unrest to Dr. Amiri, cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco (“All Is Lost”) emphasizing the emotional gulf of a space between her and Clay.
Clay has been repeatedly told by friends, including rising politico Warren (Aldis Hodge), that he might as well step outside the marriage, too, as Kaya has. But Clay is too uncomfortable in his own skin — in all senses — and uncertain of his cracking masculinity to even consider the impulse or act on it confidently. And if ever you needed to hear the argument that heterosexual couples should institute open marriages the way gay people so comfortably do — and have made all but a relationship standard at this point — “The Dutchman” makes that case. Guys, this would easily solve a lot of your problems upfront.
So it’s no surprise that Clay is tentative, nervous, and even a bit humiliated when Lula sidles up to him on a subway car, Mara styled in a strappy bodycon dress and raven-red hair to overstate her mirage-like entrance into his life. Did Clay dream this white woman up, or is this dour manic pixie dream girl only a literary device, the movie itself dreaming, whose attention-getting silhouette is also meant to call attention to her own artifice as a writer’s creation? “The Dutchman” dances with such meta, don’t-forget-this-is-a-movie self-consciousness throughout, as Clay’s New York environment subtly morphs around him. It’s not entirely explained why or developed further, more ominous mood-setting to externalize Clay’s splintering psyche. Setting a long stretch on the subway, too, conjures feelings around the repeat killings of Black men on MTA cars. In other words, for someone like Clay, it’s already a dangerous environment fraught with the potential for violence — emotional and physical.
Lula’s (is that really her name?) sexual rapaciousness takes hold when they wind up back at her apartment, Clay’s physical arousal undeniable and even visible, she claims. She says she’s so sure she felt his erection that she could draw a map of it. Lula wants to be thrown around onto the bed, a gesture Clay has a nervous feeling about — even in the privacy of a studio apartment, the idea of a Black man physically taking charge of a white woman in this way comes with its own obvious baggage.
Gaines works to free the stagebound source material by having Lula follow (i.e. basically stalk) Clay into the night, and to a party celebrating Warren, where Kaya is in attendance and feeling vindictive. Confrontations ensue as Clay’s dark night of the soul finally puts his marriage on trial, and Lula’s true intentions begin to reveal themselves. But “The Dutchman” the movie doesn’t quite transcend the feeling of having been a play, despite some supernatural flourishes in which Clay drifts into a dream state seemingly to confront other versions of himself. Still, as with any great theater, the performances here are superb, with Holland telegraphing Clay’s years of insecurity into the confines of a one-night-only movie that opens a window onto a Black identity crisis, only to shut it down on us as we peer over the sill.
Grade: B
“The Dutchman” premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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