There’s a sequence in “Just Mercy” — one of many — that will shake you to your soul. It’s the late 1980s, and Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a young African-American lawyer in cri…
” is about. The movie is a true-life legal drama, or maybe we should call it a Civil Rights drama — though part of its special emotional texture is that Bryan Stevenson, in setting out to save the lives of men he thinks of as brothers, and to bring justice to a place where the rule of law is treated as a fig leaf for violence, is fighting for Civil Rights at the moment when America has moved on, dropping that battle from its headlines, as if the fight were no longer necessary.
Yet in “Just Mercy,” director Destin Daniel Cretton, who made an indie splash six years ago with “Short Term 12” and has hardly been heard from since, finds a newly supple way to deliver a liberal Hollywood knockout punch.
But Stevenson has come to slay the dragon of the impossible. That’s what the Civil Rights impulse was — is — about.’s performance is quietly amazing. His Bryan doesn’t get angry, at least not on the surface. If you observed him from a distance, you’d say that he’s strictly business, keeping his eye on the ball . But, in fact, Jordan’s acting simmers with the force of someone who’s absorbed a thousand slights, a thousand insults, a thousand rages, and will reverse that karma by keeping his cool.
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