Actors are drawn to biopics like moths to a particularly bright, often gold-tinted flame because it allows them to test their impressionistic mettle, to inhabit the real life of someone who’s often larger than life, to chart how an extraordinary human being is transformed into an emblem of their moment. Audiences are drawn to biopics because we love actors, or at the very least we like seeing them trying to fill the shoes of these renowned figures and find the person beneath the symbolic purpose, shouted slogans, and prosthetic schnozzes. These movies are part history cosplay, part acting obstacle course. Sometimes, the difference between IRL subject and performer gets blurred beyond recognition — there’s a very good chance that you imagine Sir Ben Kingsley’s version of Mahatma Gandhi when someone mentions the nonviolent activist. Ditto Robert De Niro/Jake La Motta, Coleman Domingo/Bayard Rustin, and Faye Dunaway/Joan Crawford.
No one is likely to conjure up Regina King in their mind’s eye if someone were to name-drop Shirley Chisholm, even after they’ve seen her portray the 1972 presidential candidate in write-director John Ridley‘s Shirley. That’s not to say that the Oscar winner doesn’t go all in on the former Brooklyn school teacher who became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, then mounted a grassroots campaign to be the Democrat’s chosen nominee against Nixon. When the word went out that King was going to play Chisholm in this look back at that revolutionary bid for the highest office, you felt a tingle of anticipation: What could an actor of her caliber do with a political barnstormer like Shirley? The answer is that King can give you her humor, her steel backbone, her savvy, her sense of righteousness, and her conviction that power really did belong to the people. She refuses to let Shirley’s signature glasses and pouffy hairdo do all of the heavy lifting.
It’s just that King is doing all of this within the confines of a movie that works better as a cultural restoration piece than a biographical drama, and the result is that Shirley becomes one more example of an emotionally committed performance in a good-enough film. If this gets one person to go — Wait, a Black woman ran for president? In the 1970s? Competing in the primaries against both party favorites and George “Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever” Wallace?! Tell me more! — then Ridley and King’s passion project will have done its job as a corrective. It’s an underdog tale worth retelling a million times over, a textbook example of a narrative in which personal victory is snatched from the jaws of seemingly endless defeats. You just wish this didn’t feel so dutiful in detailing that journey number by painted-in number.
Ripley does have an instinct for filmmaking grace notes, however, dropping in a number of arresting compositions (he loves uncentered framing and negative space) and low-key moments that complement what his star is doing. There’s an early sequence in which Chisholm is joining her class of Congress folk for a photo, and after she takes her place within the group, the camera pulls back and presents her as an island of Black female progressiveness within a sea of white patriarchy. It’s the sort of shot that seems obvious when you describe it and exquisite when you actually see it — Chisholm’s struggle against the establishment telegraphed in one beautiful, signifying image.
Glen Wilson/Netflix
Later, after political organizer Wesley “Mac” Holder (Lance Reddick, in extraordinary form) and state legislator Arthur Hardwick Jr. (Terrence Howard) approach her with news that she’d likely have support for a presidential bid in 1972, Shirley goes headfirst into Round One of campaigning, and stumps for folks to get onboard “the Chisholm Trail.” After rolling through rallies and public appearances, she comes home late and discovers there’s no food in the house. Her husband, Conrad (Michael Cherrie), offers to grab her something, but everything’s closed. She plops down at her kitchen table, and Ripley holds the shot for a long time, letting King sit in silence and communicate a bone-deep sense of weariness. There are handfuls of these little collaborative bits of business between the director and his star-producer, small pinpricks of exhilaration that pop up in Shirley that are just enough to distinguish it from the usual true-story re-creations of trials, tragedies, and triumphs.
Still, this is primarily a film on a mission to remind people how a woman dared to take on the establishment, and had the sheer audacity to think that a democracy should serve, if not outright prioritize the needs of all of its citizens. So we get a lot of backstage strategizing and backroom dealmaking, as well as a peek at how the era’s Black politicians and kingmakers — like Ron Dellums (Dorian Messick) and Walter Fauntroy (André Holland, putting a slightly dandy-ish spin on the pastor/Civil Rights-leader) — contributed to the electoral sausage-making. Chisholm hires both Robert Gottlieb (Lucas Hedges), a young law student at Cornell, and veteran campaign manager Stanley Townsend (Brian Stokes Mitchell), effectively placing an ideological angel and devil on each shoulder. One leans into the purity of Chisholm’s vision for enlisting Black, Chicano, and young citizens into the cause. The other wants to do whatever it takes to win, period. As for Shirley, her utopian dream is making people think change is possible. Forget voter registration. She’s gunning for voter inspiration.
Meanwhile, the life-and-times checklist gets checked, from an attack on Chisholm to her visiting George Wallace (W. Earl Brown) as he recovers from his own assassination attempt, to the delegate drama surrounding the Democratic Convention in Miami. The period-appropriate funky soundtrack shares audio space with a whimsically uplifting score and some generically sentimental string sections. A young, bright-eyed Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson) goes through various cycles of empowerment and disillusionment; the real Lee offers a voiceover coda about the path that Chisholm paid not just for her but many political hopefuls of all races, colors, and creeds.
The film peaks and dips with enough frequency to occasionally cause motion sickness, but King’s performance provides a balance. It’s the one constant that guides Shirley through its rockier moments and to its inevitable bummer conclusion. (Spoiler: Chisholm did not get elected president!) Yet in King’s hands, this fighter refuses to go down or even acknowledge her electoral TKOs as defeats. This petite immigrant from Barbados — described by her spouse as “100 pounds of nuclear energy” — set out to give hope to several demographics still reeling from the hopeless annus horribilis that was 1968. Shirley takes those parameters and reframes that failed campaign as a rousing success story.
It’s also worth noting that it’s virtually impossible to watch the careful recounting of that bygone election year and not think of its similarities to our current moment. Racism, sexism, outsider candidates, insider handshake deals, media complicity, exploited working-class grievances, the notion of the status quo preventing real progressive moves forward — we’re still dealing with these things today, amplified and weaponized a hundredfold. The film may offer a Cliff Notes history lesson and a scrapbook take on a life, but it does make you wish Shirley was still around, talking truth to power right now and offering one more aspirational example for those who might step up and disrupt.
