‘The Dutchman’ review: André Holland stars in a risky stage-to-screen translation

Based on the 1964 play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka, Andre Gaines’ modern telling of The Dutchman takes some wild adaptational swings. Whether they pay off is another matter — truth be told, they often don’t — but the sheer creative gall behind the movie is worthy of note, making it a fascinating artifact of stage-to-screen translation. The play, about a seductive white woman approaching and berating a Black man on the New York subway, was first penned in the wake of Malcolm X’s killing as a means to explore the fraught dynamic between white and Black America at the time, as well Black men’s evolving relationship to themselves.

One needn’t be familiar with Baraka’s work before watching the film, though it certainly helps, given the metatextual approach taken by Gaines and co-writer Qasim Basir, which frames the play as something that exists within the world of the film, even as a similar plot unfolds. One would assume any modernization must, by nature, update these specific politics, but The Dutchman provides in-world justifications for both deviating from its train setting at times while closely following its central themes.

This approach has its pros and cons, beginning with the fact that it seldom brings any new form of political thought to the table. However, that it so willingly ties itself to a 60-year-old text is its own form of artistic inquiry. Although it struggles to articulate its reasons for doing so, there’s something poignant lurking just beneath the surface of its cinematic translation. That its unearthing of this reason only reaches skin-deep is nothing if not tragic.

What is The Dutchman about?

 A couple in the throes of marital tensions, businessman Clay (Holland) and his wife Kaya (Zazie Beetz) attend couples’ counseling with their therapist, Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson) — a name with some significance. From the word go, The Dutchman frames itself as an self-referential adaptation steeped practically in magical realism, when Dr. Amiri, in an effort to help Clay address his identity crisis as a Black man inching toward a political career, hands him a copy of the play on which the movie is based.

Clay refuses the doctor’s self-help gift, and before long, bizarre events begin transpiring around him, including subtle transformations to the movie’s backdrop, though these are more for the audience to notice than the character (some production design elements begin to morph, albeit unbeknownst to Clay, and in ways the movie doesn’t circle back to). When he sits down on a subway train, he’s approached flirtatiously by Lula (Kate Mara), a white stranger who knows a little too much about his private life for comfort. Soon, she demands he take her to the party where he’s headed, a celebration of his friend Warren (Aldis Hodge) launching his political campaign.

Along the lengthy subway ride, and eventually, when they stop at Lula’s apartment en route to the party, she seduces him while also prodding at his insecurities. Given the film’s absurdist bent, he’s seldom able (or willing) to break away from her grasp. When he tries, she takes full advantage of her white femininity, and threatens to falsely report him for rape if he ditches her before the evening’s festivities, recalling the racially-charged accusations against Black men and boys throughout American history — the kind that led to the lynching of Emmet Till. This razor-sharp tension arises early on, though it doesn’t escalate, which feels like a missed opportunity. 

Clay’s predicament results in Lula accompanying him throughout the night, and meeting not only Warren, but Clay’s wife at the party too. With his marriage (and perhaps even his safety) at stake, he’s forced to confront the racial anxieties with which Lula verbally accosts him, while also learning more about why these strange events — seemingly foretold in an old stage play, which eventually ends up in his possession through mysterious circumstances — have begun unfolding.

Unfortunately, these confrontations only have the appearance of looking inward, toward the double consciousness (à la W.E.B. Du Bois) allegedly experienced by Clay as a Black man in America. The film’s themes resemble familiar philosophical musings about modern Black history and lived experience — about navigating the white gaze and the discomforts of assimilation, which it mostly gestures toward in words. But despite taking the shape of Baraka’s play (and taking some of its words verbatim), The Dutchman fails to create a thematic or temporal continuum between the more radical ideologies and praxis of the Civil Rights era and its relatively tame presentation of identity politics today.

This is despite the fact that it attempts to chart a very direct course — a literary continuum of sorts — between the events of the play and those of the movie. Their relationship is almost that of an original and its legacy sequel, with the latter caught halfway between treading new ground and playing on familiar sentiments. This is where The Dutchman both succeeds conceptually and fails thematically.

What is the relationship between The Dutchman and its source material?

Given how early the movie tips its hand, it isn’t hard to figure out that its events are both a re-telling as well as a modern echo of those in Baraka’s script. Both the stage production and the subsequent, hour-long 1967 film adaptation by Anthony Harvey (which finds itself referenced as well) are set almost entirely in one train car, a setting Gaines’ film both departs from and keeps returning to over the course of its 88 minutes.

By invoking this idea of textual repetition, the way Stephen King does in The Dark Tower, or Hideaki Anno does in the Evangelion films, The Dutchman comments on itself (and on Baraka’s play as well), framing its events as prescient, and almost prophetic. The struggles present in the original story live on in the present as well. And with the character of Dr. Amiri — a Baraka stand-in — attempting to provide Clay with insight through art, it speaks to not only what these repetitive sociological questions of identity might be, but where their answers may lie.

That’s a fascinating idea in concept, but if it sounds dry and academic, well, that’s exactly how it plays in The Dutchman too. Clay, whose name hints at a certain malleability, is certainly a product of his environment, but his relationship to the world around him is largely expressed in words. Sometimes, he makes claims about himself, the truth or falsehood of which tells us something about him, and in other moments, Lula regales him (and therefore, us) with facts about his life. However, despite breaking from the stageplay’s confines, the movie’s use of multiple locations seldom offers us any insight as to how Clay actually lives in or navigates the world at large. He is, ironically, a symbolic descendant of the original Clay in Baraka’s writing, filtered down into a series of derivative ideas, rather than a fully-formed individual reckoning with the echoes of art and history in his own unique way — a malformed aspect of his character that, unfortunately, goes hand-in-hand with half-baked visual flourishes.

The filmmaking behind The Dutchman never pushes it into surreal territory.

When the movie’s relationship to the play first comes to light, a few visual cues — from wobbles in space to overt lighting changes — portend something meaningful in the ether when Clay descends the subway steps, as though he were entering a dreamscape (this distortion is assisted by apparent flaws and cracks in the lenses). However, while the changes themselves are overt and obvious, signaling to the audience that something is afoot, their underlying meanings and effects are not. The color palette merely transitions to something colder and dingier, without any tangible details noticeably shifting.

This superficial switching of modes speaks to how The Dutchman approaches its relationship to Baraka’s play. Their immediate relationship is an oddity — a ripple in time — but beyond that, Gaines and Basir add nothing new, beyond a few unpleasant moments of Lula’s racial animus towards Black women. Her provocations are certainly self-aware, but they rarely (if ever) draw something truly visceral out of Clay. Despite a self-reflexive approach to literature and its impact, the movie’s surreal happenings don’t affect its protagonist the way good surrealism would. They don’t stir within him any thought or discomfort beyond the words thrown his way, mere reminders that he’s a Black man in a white world and a Black world simultaneously, forever cursed to oscillate between the two. Even when familiar faces start appearing to Clay in places they ordinarily shouldn’t, the impact is temporary, and ends up dulled through over-explanation.

When the film comes to the same conclusions as the stage play, about the uniqueness for (and the unique need for) Black culture and Black artistic expression, it feels entirely untethered from the story we’ve just seen, emanating practically out of the blue. Holland and Mara deliver intense, dialed-in performances — they must, given how wordy their roles end up being — but there’s only so much they can do as actors tasked with an ostensible revival that demands novelty from them, but doesn’t provide them with the right creative tools, material, or platform.

As a first-time feature filmmaker, Gaines gets just enough right when it comes to engendering curiosity. The Dutchman moves forward without slowing down. But while it starts with a lofty idea, seeking to canonize the relationship between Black stories across the decades, it ends up with little to say either about the then, or the now. The result isn’t so much the righteous rage of Baraka’s searing original work, but rather, sound and fury that, through its very repetition, perpetuates a cycle rather than a break with its struggle.

The Dutchman was reviewed out of the 2025 SXSW Film Festival.