By Any Means: Racism, Revenge and the Law’s Dirty Hands

Lede

By Any Means asks what happens when the law meets people who have abandoned reason, empathy and basic humanity – then quietly borrows a mafia hitman.

Hermit Off Script

What would you do? That is what kept bothering me through By Any Means. We can sit comfortably in 2026 and talk about procedure, restraint and doing everything correctly, but this film takes us back only 60 years to a place where Black Americans could be terrorised simply for being Black, while some of the people meant to represent order were either useless, compromised or part of the problem. That is not ancient history. There are people alive now who were alive then. And into this nightmare walks Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as an FBI agent trying to work through the law, alongside Mark Wahlberg as Gregory Scarpa, a mafia killer who appears to have arrived with his own alternative justice system and an upgraded prosthetic nose that enters some scenes before the rest of him. Yes, the nose is real – well, fake, but actually there. What interested me more is what happens to Yahya’s character. He starts with rules and gradually gets an education in the sort of mafia problem-solving where the complaints department appears to be a fist. The horror underneath it is real enough: Vernon Dahmer was attacked by Klansmen in his own home in January 1966, fought back while his family escaped and died from his burns later that day. The film gives a glimpse of what being the wrong colour in the wrong part of America could mean, and the uncomfortable part is that racism did not politely die with the decade. The scale and legal environment have changed enormously, but the latest FBI figures still record thousands of hate crimes and show race, ethnicity and ancestry as the largest single-bias category. The film’s hardest temptation is the old eye-for-an-eye argument: when people burn homes, murder activists and refuse every language except force, what exactly are you meant to explain to them? I understand why the film pushes you there. But what would I do? I would want the law to become strong enough that nobody needs to borrow a gangster. If justice only starts working after it hires violence off the books, justice has already admitted something went badly wrong.

BY ANY MEANS | Official Trailer (2026) 4K

Movie synopsis

Set in Mississippi during the civil-rights era, the film follows Black FBI agent Wayne Strider as he investigates racist killings and is forced into an unlikely partnership with Gregory Scarpa, a violent mafia figure working as an FBI informant. Their methods collide as the investigation moves towards the Ku Klux Klan and the murder of civil-rights leader Vernon Dahmer, forcing Strider to confront the limits of lawful procedure and the attraction of retaliation. Paramount describes the film as based on a true story, although Strider is a fictional composite and parts of Scarpa’s historical role remain disputed.

Cast and credits

Director: Elegance Bratton
Writer: Sascha Penn
Genre: Crime drama, historical thriller
Main cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Giancarlo Esposito, Josh Lucas, David Strathairn, Ethan Embry, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze
Composer: Terence Blanchard
Production company/studio: Hammerstone Studios, Thunder Road Films, Freedom Principle and Municipal Pictures; distributed by Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 107 minutes
Release year and platform: 2026 theatrical release; Paramount Pictures released the film in the US on 4 September 2026.

What does not make sense

• America apparently needed a gangster to demonstrate that burning people’s homes and murdering civil-rights activists was, in fact, rather serious.
• The FBI agent at the centre of the film is fictional, yet the film arrives wearing the very flexible Hollywood badge marked “based on a true story“.
• Outsourcing violence does not give an institution clean hands. It merely puts the dirty hands on contract.
• Vernon Dahmer’s murder should keep Dahmer at the centre of the story, yet members of his family have publicly argued that the film exaggerates Scarpa’s importance and shifts attention away from Dahmer’s own civil-rights work.
• The revenge is cathartic because the racism is horrifying. That does not automatically make revenge the same thing as justice.
• White supremacists demanding social order while using murder, arson and intimidation to preserve their own hierarchy must rank fairly high in humanity’s long competition for self-awareness.

Sense check / The numbers

1. On 10 January 1966, 2 carloads of Ku Klux Klan members attacked Vernon Dahmer’s home and shop. The Justice Department says 14 men were involved, 4 were convicted in federal court, and Klan leader Sam Bowers was finally convicted by Mississippi in 1998. [US Department of Justice]
2. In the 1964 Mississippi Burning case, 3 civil-rights workers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – were murdered. Their bodies were recovered on 4 August, buried 14 feet beneath an earthen dam. In 1967, 7 of 18 defendants were convicted, while Edgar Ray Killen was not convicted until 2005. [FBI]
3. By Any Means runs for 107 minutes and opened theatrically in the US on 4 September 2026. Those numbers establish the film; they do not establish every event it dramatises as historical fact. [Paramount; IMDb]
4. For 2025, US law-enforcement agencies reported 10,881 hate-crime incidents involving 13,438 victims. Among victims of single-bias incidents, 55.6 per cent involved race, ethnicity or ancestry. That is not evidence that America remains in 1966, but it certainly does not support declaring racial hatred extinct. [US Department of Justice; FBI]

The sketch

Scene 1: The clean badge
An FBI agent silhouette holds a rulebook outside a burning house while a hooded extremist silhouette stands behind a courthouse-shaped barricade.
Dialogue:
Agent: “The law will handle this.”
Barricade: “We know the law.”

Scene 2: Outsourced justice
The same agent stands beside a gangster silhouette holding a baseball bat while an official quietly slides a folder across a desk.
Dialogue:
Official: “We need answers.”
Gangster: “Define legal.”

Scene 3: Sixty years later
The same agent silhouette looks at a modern phone displaying a long hate-crime report while an old 1966 calendar hangs behind him.
Dialogue:
Phone: “Problem solved?”
Agent: “Apparently not.”

What to watch, not the show

• How institutions behave when legal authority exists on paper but fails the people it is supposed to protect.
• The difference between force used to stop immediate violence and revenge sold afterwards as justice.
• Hollywood’s habit of placing a colourful violent outsider at the centre of history that was actually made by ordinary people who resisted oppression for years.
• The dispute over Gregory Scarpa’s role and the danger of leaving the cinema remembering the gangster more clearly than Vernon Dahmer.
• How racial hatred changes form when the law and social norms change around it.
• Current hate-crime reporting, rather than the comforting assumption that the civil-rights era permanently cured the disease.
• The seductive idea that brutality becomes morally clean when the target deserves no sympathy.

The Hermit take

By Any Means works best when it makes 1966 feel disturbingly close.
The ugly joke is that when justice needs a mafia subcontractor, the system has already confessed.

Keep or toss

Keep.

Keep Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the historical horror, the moral discomfort and Mark Wahlberg’s travelling nose.
Toss the temptation to confuse satisfying revenge-thriller fiction with a documentary record of who actually delivered justice.

Sources

• Paramount Pictures – official film page and synopsis: https://www.paramountpictures.com/movies/by-any-means
• US Department of Justice – Vernon Dahmer attack and prosecution record: https://www.justice.gov/crt/case-document/vincent-dahmon-notice-close-file
• FBI – Mississippi Burning case history: https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/mississippi-burning
• FBI – civil-rights and KKK investigations in Mississippi: https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/kkk-series
• US Department of Justice – 2025 hate-crime statistics: https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics
• FBI – 2025 reported crime and hate-crime figures: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2025-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics
• WLOX – Dennis Dahmer Sr. disputes the film’s portrayal of Scarpa’s role: https://www.wlox.com/2026/09/10/vernon-dahmers-son-says-new-film-by-any-means-misrepresents-fathers-1966-murder/
• Film Music Reporter – Terence Blanchard score and production credits: https://filmmusicreporter.com/2026/08/20/terence-blanchard-scoring-elegance-brattons-by-any-means/
• IMDb – runtime, director, writer and principal cast: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34379051/