Director Elegance Bratton’s new movie takes place during a harrowing time.
Hooded menaces from the Ku Klux Klan are terrorizing Mississippi, firebombing the homes of voting rights advocates. The film, By Any Means, is set in 1966, when white supremacists and police gravely endangered the live of Black residents. In 2026, the United States remains troubled by these perils, which routinely fill headlines.
“I think about racism, police brutality, classism, sexism, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, all of it, all the time, because I’m a Black man in America,” Bratton says. “It’s just a part of how I view myself in the world. As a mode of safety, I have to consider these things, period.”
But when the director from New Jersey was making the film, he had one main concern.
“I want the audience to have a good f—ing time,” he says.
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“This economy is trash,” says Bratton, 47, a Jersey City native who grew up in Phillipsburg. “The world is trash. You deserve to go to the theater and be taken on a thrill ride, something that just grabs you by the throat, takes you on a journey, doesn’t apologize for it.”
By Any Means, a crime thriller starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg, debuts in theaters September 4.The movie tells a story inspired by real events. After the murder of a community leader at the hands of the KKK, the FBI brings in a New York Mafia hitman to help break the case. Wahlberg dons prosthetic makeup in the film to play real-life mob killer Gregory Scarpa. The Colombo crime family capo, dubbed the Grim Reaper, used violence to force information out of people.
Abdul-Mateen plays Wayne Strider, a Black FBI agent partnered with Scarpa to investigate the murder of Vernon Dahmer, a local NAACP chapter president. After the white-hooded men firebomb Dahmer’s home in the film, townspeople in Hattiesburg, Mississippi are tight-lipped about the murder due to the far-reaching power of white supremacists in the community—power to kill anyone who talked. Enter Scarpa and his “by any means” tactics of routing out the killers.
The film pairs a Black protagonist with a New York Italian tough guy on a journey through the South in the 1960s. That general setup is sure to ring a bell with audiences. So yes, Bratton has seen social media chatter comparing the movie to 2019 best picture winner Green Book.
“They say you shouldn’t look at the comments, but I look at all the comments,” he says.
“Ultimately, this film is very different than Green Book in that this is an exploration of the power of corrective violence and revolutionary violence,” Bratton says. “It’s an exploration of the complicated work it’s going to take to actually fix this country that we live in. Greg Scarpa is nobody’s white savior. He is another man whose systems have let him down, and he is the result of what he’s been raised around … If anything, he’s a soldier, and these are two soldiers on an unusual mission who, throughout their work, get to understand each other better. And that’s right out of my life.”
The Paramount Pictures movie is the first big studio film for Bratton, a filmmaker whose own path has taken a trajectory worthy of the silver screen.
In the ’90s, he became homeless as a teen after his mother kicked him out for being gay. He spent 10 years in shelters before he joined the Marines in 2005, during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era. There, he became a photographer and combat filmmaker. Later, he studied at Columbia University and attended film school, earning his MFA from New York University. Bratton’s first film was the 2019 documentary Pier Kids, which won the Truer Than Fiction Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. The film followed members of the LGBTQ community from New York’s Christopher Street Pier, a place he knew from his own experiences. As a teen, he went there to join many others who had been rejected by their families.
Bratton’s journey also directly informed his 2022 narrative feature debut, The Inspection, starring Jeremy Pope and Gabrielle Union. The A24 film, which Bratton called “Black gay Rocky,” won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Independent Motion Picture and received nominations at the Golden Globes and Independent Spirit Awards.
The director’s complicated bond with his mother is at the core of The Inspection, which sees Pope’s character take on Marine Corps boot camp. In 2020, just as he was given the green light to make the movie, he learned that his mother, Inell Jones, had been fatally stabbed by his 22-year-old sister in their Rahway home. In 2024, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Bratton was not on speaking terms with Jones when she died. Filming the movie became part of his grieving process. Union’s performance as the protagonist’s mother provided some measure of closure.
“I’m still myself, I’m still the guy who made The Inspection,” Bratton says of his work on By Any Means. “This is me expanding the palette a bit.” He also produced the movie.
“I’ve always been fascinated by institutions, particularly masculinity within institutions, and the ways in which institutions betray us and let us down,” he says. “For me, the question was like, ‘OK, how do I do an Elegance Bratton movie at scale? How do I make a movie that is a thriller, but stay true to myself in the process?’ And I’m really proud of where we landed, for sure.”
Living Out His Dream
Bratton saw Abdul-Mateen’s character as his way into the script, written by Sascha Penn (Creed II,1992 and Power Book III: Raising Kanan).
“This Black FBI agent put into an impossible task and the duo of this FBI agent and the Mafia hitman really drew me in,” Bratton says.
“What I wanted to do is tell a story that was propulsive, muscular—a story that allowed for the audience to deal with the complexity of what happens when the law is not enough to get justice.”
Strider’s identity as a Black FBI agent is mocked and laughed at in the South, where he lives with his wife Allison, played by Nicole Beharie. He faces immediate danger just doing his job and being who he is, and there are spaces where Scarpa can go that are unsafe for him to enter.
“I always say my motto as a filmmaker is to bring the audience to a place that they could never go without me,” Bratton says. “And through this Black point of view, I’m able to craft a cinematic language around a moment that we really never see. We never see the civil rights era films rooted in the Black law perspective.” The director, who filmed By Any Means in Georgia, sprinkled in some New Jersey mentions, like when Scarpa is offended that someone thinks he might be from Jersey (not Bensonhurst, Brooklyn).
The movie is the latest chapter in Bratton’s growing film career. He’s set to helm a biopic of tennis great Arthur Ashe, which is currently being cast. In 2025, Bratton premiered his Chicago-set house music documentary Move Ya Body: The Birth of House at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which won a Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award from the Gotham Film & Media Institute, was not picked up for theatrical distribution.
“Hopefully, my friends at Paramount see the value of Elegance Bratton and they come to Move Ya Body,” the director says. “I hope so. They need it, that’s for sure. They don’t have a good house music doc (on Paramount+).” The film explores the origins of house music in Chicago’s Black and LGBTQ communities. After the documentary did not find a distributor last year, he posted on Instagram about witnessing “a quiet purging: of Black stories, queer stories, stories by women” in a climate where “Blackness is simultaneously under attack and devalued.”
Bratton says he will self-release Move Ya Body in theaters this year with his Freedom Principle producing partner Chester Algernal Gordon. Bratton and Gordon have been married since 2017 and live in Baltimore. During research for By Any Means, they met people connected to Dahmer and Scarpa.
“Vernon Dahmer is the moral center of this film,” Bratton says. “Vernon was a family man, a civil rights activist, a true pillar of his community … Vernon was also the highest employer for Hattiesburg, that area of Mississippi, in his lifetime. So there were people in Hattiesburg who were in the Klan who actually worked for Vernon and refused to assassinate Vernon. I found that interesting. I also found it very telling that the FBI knew way in advance this heat was coming down his way, and nobody told the family … There are no simple heroes or villains in this movie.”
Scarpa died of AIDS complications in 1994 while serving a prison sentence for three murders. According to Schiro’s account, he also worked with the FBI to find civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were murdered by the KKK in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964. Scarpa’s methods apparently turned up information that led authorities to where the men were buried. Wahlberg’s character makes a reference to the case.
By Any Means has drawn criticism over Wahlberg’s casting in the run up to the film’s release. People point to the fact of his racially charged crimes in his teen years, before he burst onto the public stage as rapper Marky Mark. While Wahlberg has made apologies, that history has followed his substantial Hollywood career.
Wahlberg, a producer on By Any Means, brought the film to Paramount through his working relationship with studio executive Josh Greenstein after the movie was made independently in 2025. Famed songwriter Diane Warren wrote the song By Any Means, performed by the Isley Brothers and David Kushner. “I have my little dream book that I’ve collected since I was in the Marine Corps, and as this career started coming into focus for me, Diane is in that book,” Bratton says. “Mark is in that book.” So is Terence Blanchard, the film’s Oscar-nominated composer.
“It’s a dream come true,” the director says. “Diane Warren is an institution in this business, and she is relentless in her pursuit of her craft. And I think she’s written a beautiful song, and I got to be there to record it with the Isley Brothers. If you hang out with Diane at her studio, it’s kind of cool because there’s famous musicians that are coming in and out of there all day. So I got to meet Dionne Warwick … It’s beyond. If I could go back to that kid in the homeless shelter 20-plus years ago, I would love to tell him that everything’s going to be OK.”
