Marshall turns a real-life hero into the lead of a pretty good courtroom drama

There’s something irresistible about the notion of a powerful orator and skillful arguer forced to work around the muting of that skill set, and Marshall doesn’t fully capitalize on this procedural angle. Though Friedman initially tries not to stick his neck out (pleading for his client to consider a plea deal) and makes a few My Cousin Vinny-ish blunders, he generally adapts to Marshall’s direction and style pretty well. If this transformation isn’t especially dramatic, it also keeps Marshall and Friedman on a more even keel—though Gad is the actor who gets a real character arc, Marshall doesn’t fully turn into a movie about a black man helping a white man become a better person. It has those overtones, but Boseman never cedes the screen to Gad.

What Marshall does is take the recent slice-of-life style of small-scale biopics and sheds even more biographical details until it becomes a modest but entertaining courtroom thriller. Perhaps sensing the movie’s potential for biopic tedium, director Reginald Hudlin only allows a single scene where Marshall hobnobs with… why, it’s Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Huston (both referred to by their full names, naturally—which is to say, not naturally at all). He even makes the scene bearable by establishing Marshall as, amusingly, borderline disdainful of his former schoolmate turned acclaimed poet.

That’s typical of the light touch Hudlin, a veteran movie and TV comedy director, brings to this project. He doesn’t exactly turn a Thurgood Marshall case into a zany brazen-black-guy-and-cautious-white-guy buddy comedy, but the relationship hits some of those notes while moving along too quickly to gather much self-importance, thanks in part to a script that offers dialogue of speed and conviction. Hudlin also has a way of both heroizing and humanizing his subject, often shot from low angles, wearing a jaunty hat, or with a cigarette hanging from his lips with the ease of a star from the movie’s 1940s period.

This breezy approach has its limits; Marshall isn’t so different from a well-made TV movie. But it plays well on the big screen anyway, and there’s some relevance in the way it depicts competing forms of bigotry—racism alongside anti-Semitism and expectations about female sexuality. It also touches, however briefly, on the enormity of the task before Marshall and the NAACP, essentially fighting racism on a case-by-case basis. It might be crude to suggest a series of legal thrillers based on the career of Thurgood Marshall, but Marshall makes the idea sound vaguely appealing.