I didn't know (but wasn't the least surprised) that the US government installed a mole inside the Black Panther party, and this is that story. We met a petty crook, Bill O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), busting into a bar frequented by African Americans, flashing a badge, lining up all the startled occupants and proceeding outside the steal a car, not an FBI agent at all but a common car thief, only just getting away with his life after he realises they're onto him.

He's delivered into the hands of real FBI agent Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who gives him an impossible choice – do serious time for impersonating a federal officer or infiltrate the Black Panther party and get close to its firebrand leader, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), with Mitchell as his handler, and inform on their activities so J Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) has all the pretence he needs to criminalise and end them.

As O'Neal rises through the ranks, becoming Hampton's driver and confidante, he learns more than he ever wanted to know about radical black nationalism, eventually seeing Hampton as a human rather than a revolutionary through the latter's relationship Deborah (Dominique Fishback), a woman who works at the party headquarters.

Eventually O'Neal is promoted all the way to the party's security chief, still funnelling information to Mitchell and with not just his conscience smarting because of the impending betrayal of a man who's become his friend but the increased law enforcement heat that comes as the Panthers grow more incendiary – while Hampton is in jail on trumped up charges, the cops take the opportunity to attack the headquarters wth guns and explosives.

As history shows, it ends very badly for Hampton and the Panthers, and O'Neal is left wondering if he sold out to The Man or saved his own skin, and which one was the bigger sin.

On paper, the script and plot themselves are fairly pedestrian, but the show is all Hampton's. While portraying him as a community leader Kaluuya is soft-spoken, intelligent and almost tender, but while on stage, he's an orator for the ages, full of well-informed righteous rage. The discrimination African Americans still suffer deserves a tribute to Hampton's legacy and that of their struggle for freedom, and this movie is one of many well-executed examples.