What we’re watching: Michael B Jordan’s Just Mercy, a true story civil rights film about a lawyer defending a black man unjustly accused of murder. Via the Guardian:
“You don’t know what you’re into down here in Alabama,” he warns. “Here you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.”
That phrase could stand as a catchphrase for the ingrained racial injustice that Bryan Stevenson, the rookie lawyer played in the film by Michael B Jordan, has devoted his adult life to fighting.
From his first meeting with McMillian in 1988 to his star billing today as one of America’s most incisive commentators on race and inequity – and now as a fully fledged Hollywood icon – Stevenson has never taken his eyes off the prize.
His epic six-year struggle to prove McMillian an innocent man provides the narrative arc of Just Mercy. It is based on the 2014 memoir of the same name in which Stevenson, 60, relates how he came to find himself representing some of the most godforsaken prisoners in the country.