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| André Holland and Kate Mara |
'The Dutchman'
Review: André Holland Is Lost in New York
Andre Gaines’s The Dutchman opens with a Carl Jung quote: “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” It is a fitting prologue for a film that peers into the internal fractures of race, desire, and identity. Co-written by Gaines and Qasim Basir, this stylized psychological thriller reimagines Amiri Baraka’s incendiary 1964 stage play as a modern fever dream—one that keeps Baraka’s fire but refracts it through the polished surfaces of contemporary New York.
André Holland plays Clay, a successful businessman and husband whose life begins to unravel after discovering his wife Kaya’s (Zazie Beetz) affair. The film opens in a couples therapy session with their counselor, Dr. Amiri (Stephen McKinley Henderson), where Clay’s tight composure fractures just enough to reveal the depth of his hurt. After Kaya leaves the room, Dr. Amiri offers a strangely personal prescription: Dutchman, the play that once guided him through one of the darkest periods of his own life. The gesture feels both intimate and out of pocket, and it plants the seed that Clay’s crisis is part of a larger, inherited script.
On a subway ride home, Clay meets Lula (Kate Mara), a white woman whose flirtatious energy quickly curdles into something sharper, charged, and cruel. With her unmistakable red hair and redder lipstick, Lula presents herself as an adventure, but the adventure is rigged from the start. The racial and sexual anxieties between them become textured and visible: her taunting, his attempts at politeness, the way desire and danger braid together in the cramped subway car. The sexual politics, as in Baraka’s play, are messy by design, forcing Clay into a role he can neither fully reject nor safely inhabit.
Gaines has said that Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman has endured “because it is not polite. It is confrontational, dangerous, and deliberately unresolved,” and he approaches the adaptation as “an act of interpretation” rather than a simple transfer from stage to screen. The original play is brutally compressed; its power comes in part from its tight focus on a single, claustrophobic encounter. Film, he argues, “demands a different kind of engagement—one that unfolds over time, space, and interiority.” The movie answers that demand by expanding Clay’s world—his marriage, professional aspirations, and emotional evasions—so that the encounter with Lula feels less like an isolated provocation and more like an inevitable collision.
“Rather than diluting the play, the expansion allowed me to excavate it,” Gaines explains, and that excavation is where the film finds its most compelling footing. In the play, Clay is cornered in a subway car; in the film, it becomes clear how he has already been cornering himself long before he ever meets Lula. The added material does not resolve the mystery of Dutchman so much as deepen its psychological stakes, shifting the focus from a single explosive encounter to the emotional and social conditions that make that explosion feel unavoidable.
For Gaines, the language of race, masculinity, and power has evolved since 1964, but the underlying tensions have not disappeared—they have changed form. Today, he notes, these conflicts often register less as overt declarations and more as “micro-negotiations: silences, compromises, performances of safety and success.” Film is uniquely suited to this terrain. A glance, a hesitation, a forced laugh—these details become as revealing as any monologue. By lingering on what Clay withholds as much as what he says, the adaptation uses cinema’s intimacy to track how racial and sexual power move through everyday interactions.
Gaines is careful to insist that his film is not an attempt to modernize Baraka’s politics or soften his edges. On the contrary, he frames his work as an effort to “honor the provocation at the heart of [Baraka’s] work by translating it into a cinematic language that contemporary audiences instinctively understand.” The subway car remains a crucible, but in the film it becomes one of many. The violence at the center of The Dutchman is not only physical; it is emotional, relational, and cumulative, the result of pressures building across Clay’s marriage, work life, and inner conflict before erupting underground.
Ultimately, Gaines describes The Dutchman as a film about inheritance—“what we carry forward, consciously or not, from the stories that shaped us.” Baraka’s play informs every choice, even when the film moves beyond its literal boundaries. That expansion is not meant to replace the original work, but to let its questions echo longer and louder, in new spaces where viewers cannot easily look away. Holland’s performance, tightly coiled yet painfully transparent, anchors this approach, while Mara’s Lula becomes less a person than a force, weaponizing charm, curiosity, and cruelty in rapid succession.
The film’s festival run reflects its ambition and its impact. The Dutchman won Best Feature at the Buffalo International Film Festival in 2025 and opened both the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival and the Bahamas International Film Festival, signaling its resonance with Black audiences and cinephiles alike. It has screened as an official selection at SXSW, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Cannes Market, as well as genre and specialty events, including Southern Fried Film Festival, Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival, Splat!FilmFest, and Through the Looking Glass. Together, these platforms frame Gaines’s adaptation as a risky, provocative work in active conversation with both Baraka’s legacy and present-day viewers.
Nationwide theatrical
https://www.amctheatres.com/movies/the-dutchman-81690
Director: Andre Gaines
Writers: Qasim Basir, Andre Gaines, Amiri Baraka
Stars: André Holland, Kate Mara, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zazie Beetz, Aldis Hodge
Rating: R
Running Time: 1h 28m
Genres: Drama, Thriller
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