'Queen & Slim'

Director Melina Matsoukas and writer Lena Waithe have been making their voices heard on TV, but they explode on the big screen with “Queen & Slim,” a searing drama about two African Americans on the run and running out of options.

It begins with a first date in a diner in Cleveland. She (Josie Turner-Smith) is a defense lawyer who just learned a client is going onto Death Row. She didn’t want to be alone tonight, so she hooked up on Tinder with the guy (Daniel Kaluuya), a working-class guy whose profile looked good. They aren’t really hitting it off, so it seems like the date will end with him taking her home, and that will be the end of it. (The movie doesn’t tell us their names until late in the film, and never uses the nicknames of the title.)

On the drive home, though, a cop (played by the country singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson) sees our guy swerve a bit, and uses that as an excuse to pull him over. He’s being cooperative, if exasperated by the familiarity of a white cop hassling a black man over nothing. The cop reads his eye-rolling as defiance, and orders him to step out of the car. She gets out of the car, demanding the cop’s badge number. Shouting ensues, until the cop suddenly shoots her in the leg. Our guy then struggles with the cop, gets the cop’s gun, and in a fateful instant, shoots the cop dead.

The details are important, because the way Waithe’s sharp screenplay and Matsoukas’ pinpoint direction depict it, the shooting can be interpreted so many different ways. Some may wonder why the couple didn’t just get on the ground or stay in the car. Others may recognize the cop’s actions for the racial profiling that they are, and see that the couple was doomed no matter what they did. What viewers see depends on where they stand, based on one’s experiences with authority — which, all too often, is determined by race.

Our couple kicks into survival mode. She tosses his cellphone out the window, aware that it could be used to track their location. They ditch his car and steal a truck from a Kentucky lawman (Benito Rodriguez). Their immediate goal is New Orleans, where her Uncle Earl (Bokeem Woodbine) might be able to help.

Along the way, they hear news reports of the interstate efforts to arrest them. They also discover that black folks along the way know all about their case, and have turned them into folk heroes — the black “Bonnie & Clyde,” as Uncle Earl puts it. But even that leads to tragic consequences.

Waithe (who shares story credit with James Frey, the infamous author of the fake memoir “A Million Little Pieces”) creates a nuanced, but electrifying, portrait of two mismatched people who turn to each other when everything is stacked against them. They know the odds of surviving this nightmare are against them, but their shared desperation provides hope that they can find a way out. Waithe also captures the intense atmosphere of an underground South, a land of marginalized people so in need of a voice that they’ll elevate this couple into legends.

Matsoukas, whose resumé ranges from music videos (notably Beyoncé’s “Formation”) to several episodes of Issa Rae’s “Insecure,” brings fascinating detail and pops of color everywhere this couple turns. And she highlights the intensity of emotions — even love and lust — that come out when the pair are looking over their shoulders.

The actors playing the title characters are compelling. Kaluuya (“Get Out,” “Black Panther”) is soulful and dynamic as a good man trying to follow the rules of surviving in America, someone who thinks fast when those rules fail him. Turner-Smith, in her first leading movie role, emerges as the emotional engine of the film, channeling righteous fury and a keen sense of preservation as they travel deeper into the South.

“Queen & Slim” will ignite arguments about the way it depicts racial injustice. One thing that can’t be argued is that Matsoukas and Waithe definitely know how to make thought-provoking, incendiary drama that isn’t afraid to dig into the fault lines between the races to see what shakes out.

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‘Queen & Slim’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, some strong sexuality, nudity, pervasive language, and brief drug use. Running time: 132 minutes.