Matewan brings to life an important moment of solidarity in labor history. The Appalachian miners learn to get along with the black and Italian men and their families who have been relocated to Mingo County by the coal companies, all to the tune of the Italian labor anthem “Avanti popolo.” Music provides a link among these groups, with Sayles showing how bluegrass, the blues, and bel canto can blend. He and composer Mason Daring give Hazel Dickens, who also appears in the movie as a townswoman, songs to sing in the haunting and expressive high lonesome of the hills, a cappella on the soundtrack and on-screen during Matewan’s inevitable funeral scene.

The miners’ union was broken by 1921, after President Warren G. Harding put the entire state of West Virginia under martial law and sent the army to the coalfields to defend the companies against their employees. By then, hundreds of miners had been killed, thousands arrested and jailed. It was not until 1935, under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, that union organizing was legally protected in the United States. Matewan came out on August 28, 1987, at the high-water mark of Ronald Reagan’s America, six years after Reagan fired more than eleven thousand air-traffic controllers for not ending a strike, and on a weekend between the premieres of Dirty Dancing and Fatal Attraction. Most of the thousands of coal jobs that would disappear over the course of Reagan’s two terms were already gone. That year in American movies was defined somewhere between Moonstruck and Lethal Weapon, with a swampy hint of Predator mixed in. Nostalgia was sweet, as in Dirty Dancing, or hyperstylized and big-budgeted, as in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. There was just as much a need then for Matewan—a film that presents real conflicts in American history, without a happy ending—as there is today.

When Sayles shot the movie in Thurmond (after deciding that the actual town of Matewan had become too modern), the population was “around sixty or seventy people,” as he writes. In 1920, the population had been 285. Today, just five people live there. Similarly, in 1920 there were 850 people in Matewan itself; now there are fewer than 450, although the town still has the vibrancy to establish and maintain, along with UMWA Local 1440, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, dedicated to preserving the history that was once buried. Even with such exceptions, towns like these are among the so-called sacrifice zones in the U.S., places where heavy industry has permanently ruined the environment, lowered life expectancy, increased poverty and drug abuse, and led to depopulation. When strip-mining and mountaintop removal replaced digging and blasting as the primary way coal is extracted from rock, coal companies eliminated jobs. The UMWA, strong through the early sixties, has seen a steady decline from its height of about half a million members.

In their 2012 book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, journalist Chris Hedges and artist Joe Sacco investigate the current situation in the coal-mining counties of Appalachia, focusing in particular on Welch, West Virginia, which is where Baldwin-Felts operatives assassinated Sid Hatfield in August 1921. There were a hundred thousand people living in McDowell County, of which Welch is the seat, in the middle of the twentieth century. Now there are fewer than twenty thousand. In the counties they visited, Hedges and Sacco found towns covered in coal dust, unbreathable air, and contaminated water. Mountaintop removal has eliminated plant and animal life in parts of West Virginia, erasing eons of geological and natural history that will never return, even if beautiful woodlands and teeming wildlife remain in other abandoned hills and hollers in the state (which Renzi and Sayles still love to visit). But the coal companies, as the authors note, have erased labor history, too, by carting away the very soil on which union men clashed with capitalist thugs, and won.

Matewan, as Sayles writes, has the structure of a western. It’s not that different in its way from High Noon or The Wild Bunch or any other movie where gunmen threaten a town. But, Sayles is careful to point out, “the purpose of the story is not nostalgia.” Two moments in particular encapsulate what that purpose is, illustrating the film’s continued relevance. “There ain’t but two sides to this world: them that work and them that don’t,” Joe explains, in a scene in Lively’s restaurant in which he has to prove himself to the miners. Instead of urging them to violence, he insists on solidarity across racial and ethnic lines. Later, when the striking miners are building their camp, Danny, in Lilly’s voice-over, recalls how Joe explained to them, “All we got in common is our misery, and the least we can do is share it.”

From Harding to Reagan and now to Donald Trump, the leaders of this country have lied to coal miners, used them up, riddled their landscape with bullets, and flooded it with slurry and ash. At one of his non-election-year rallies, in West Virginia in 2018, Trump told coal miners he was putting them back to work. “Great people,” he called them. “Brave people. I don’t know how the hell you do that, I’ll tell ya. You guys have a lot of courage. But we love clean, beautiful West Virginia coal.” He told them that wind energy, pipelines, and solar panels are fragile and hard to fix, and concluded by asking and answering his own question. “You know what you can’t hurt? Coal,” he said in front of a sign that read “Trump Digs Coal.”

Pun aside, Trump does not actually dig any coal—he is one of them that don’t work. He loves coal miners for the same reason the bosses at the Stone Mountain Coal Company did in 1920: for their capacity to be hurt, again and again. The opportunity to inflict unlimited pain and damage on workers and on the land, it goes without saying, requires the absence of unions. Matewan is one of the few movies produced in the U.S. to make the need for them its subject. The gun-toting, nonminer hillbillies who stealthily materialize out of the woods in the film know that the coal companies stole their land. We, however, have to be shown. For the past four decades, a new John Sayles film has emerged every two years or so to show us the lives and struggles official histories and other movies ignore. From New Jersey and West Virginia to Florida and Texas, Sayles has made films all over the country. Every place in America has a Matewan.