America burned in the 1960s. Entire communities were destroyed as residents madly torched their own streets, and armed soldiers rolled in like foreign conquerors.
But were these riots? Or were these uprisings?
Words matter, and the one you use to describe those events says everything about how you view them. And in "Detroit," Kathryn Bigelow declares herself right at the start.
She calls the burning of that city a "rebellion."
Oh, there's violence onscreen all right - lots of it, the sort of senseless, self-destructive violence of a people so enraged they'll break anything, even their own lives.
But that, the film suggests, was just the explosion of an underclass who felt they had nothing left to lose. If you want to see a real riot, Bigelow insists, look to the cops.
"Detroit" begins badly, with a quick sum-up of the Great Migration and the growth of urban slums. Awkwardly, crudely didactic, it feels like someone's lecture notes (the screenplay is by Bigelow's frequent collaborator, former journalist Mark Boal).
From there, though, the film skips to the spark that lit the fire - a police raid on an unlicensed bar that resulted in massive arrests, and a revolt in the streets. News clips show the looting and limitless violence that followed, and the authorities' even more unchecked response.
And then we cut to the Algiers Motel.
It may be forgotten now, but that bloodbath was the subject of an exhaustive John Hersey book once, and it's chilling to relive it onscreen: A story of innocent young civilians, black and white, whose rooms were raided by police looking for a sniper - and who then became the targets of those officers' rage and racism and terrible fear.
Bigelow starts slowly, showing the seeds of the violence and introducing us to a few characters - a trigger-happy policeman, a budding soul singer, a straight-arrow security guard, two white girls from Ohio. The shots are mostly carefully composed, and the takes are leisurely.
Then all hell breaks loose, and the film breaks free, with faster editing and jittery handheld work, as people are grabbed, beaten and brutalized. It's like the heart-in-your-throat raid from "Zero Dark Thirty" - anything can go down, anyone can go down, at any time.
There is humanity here, though, mostly because of the actors. Anthony Mackie is a standout as a careful Vietnam vet, a guy who's only moved from one battlefield to another. John Boyega is heartbreaking as a decent man who only wants to keep the peace - and finds himself abetting a war.
And there's inhumanity here, too, as personified by one bigoted cop. He's a murderous monster and Bigelow, brilliantly, casts Will Poulter in the part, a baby-faced actor whose antic eyebrows have mostly landed him in comedies until now. No one dares laugh here.
Yet in the midst of the noise, there's a large and quiet question: What's it like to live as a black man in a white world? (Or, for that matter, as a woman in a man's world - the two female "suspects" come in for their own, special brutalizing.) How much accommodation to authority is common sense? How much leads to a debilitating loss of self?
That Bigelow, a white woman, was taking on this story drew criticism early on; what did she know about race? Perhaps very little. But Bigelow has always been interested in power, in what it means to the people who hold it, and what it does to the people it is used against -- and how it can grievously hurt both.
That hasn't always been understood by people who've routinely, condescendingly applauded her for not making "chick flicks." But Bigelow's action films - from "Blue Steel" to "The Hurt Locker" - are about the costs of courage, the price of violence (particularly in "Strange Days," a truly radical movie).
And power is the real subject here, as well. Some people are comfortable handling it; the script is careful to show us some decent cops, including one chief of detectives determined to root out the bigots on the force. But others are corrupted by it. They go from enforcing the law to thinking they are the law. And with that, justice crumbles.
"Detroit" fumbles occasionally itself, having not only an uncertain beginning but an undisciplined ending - we don't need to go through endless after-the-fact scenes of arrests and interrogations and trials to see how all this will end. We know how it will end.
And it won't be good for these victims, and it won't be good for Detroit - any more than the riots in Watts, and Newark, were good for those cities, either. But they're still stories that need to be told.
And one day, maybe, learned from.
Ratings note: The film contains violence, nudity and strong language.
'Detroit' (R) Annapurna (143 min.) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. With John Boyega, Will Poulter, Anthony Mackie.
THREE AND A HALF STARS
Stephen Whitty may be reached at stephenjwhitty@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwhitty. Find him on Facebook.