‘Just Mercy’ movie review: Profoundly moving and unbearably sad

At the start of this year, “Green Book” won the Best Picture Oscar for its upbeat (or, some said, overly tidy) take on race relations in the South. “Just Mercy,” like that film also drawn from a true story, takes a much more sobering view.

Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx, both capable of explosive performances, package their energy into tightly controlled characters in the story of Walter McMillian (Foxx), a wrongly convicted man on death row in Alabama in the 1980s. Jordan plays Bryan Stevenson, a young Harvard lawyer who takes on McMillian’s case.

Both characters understand the inherent danger in being visibly angry black men, and (mostly) mute their reactions accordingly. It makes the film move differently and more quietly than you might expect from a courtroom drama; some audiences may decide the tone of this journey through multiple trials is too timid.

But I found “Just Mercy,” from director Destin Daniel Cretton (“Short Term 12”), profoundly moving and, at times, almost unbearably sad, as when Walter’s fellow death row inmate, Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan, “Mudbound”), a shy Vietnam veteran with PTSD, is put to death. It’s a chilling sequence and a striking cinematic indictment of the death penalty, of which Stevenson has been a vocal opponent throughout his career.

Brie Larson (“Captain Marvel”) feels genuinely supportive in her supporting role as Eva Ansley, Stevenson’s assistant; she’s become a star since Cretton’s “Short Term 12” in 2013, but she’s not looking for a spotlight here. O’Shea Jackson Jr. plays a cellmate of McMillian and Richardson, providing a tiny measure of comic relief as real-life inmate Anthony Ray Hinton (who, the credits note, was convicted partly because a policeman said he could tell he was guilty “just by looking at him”). Tim Blake Nelson (“Watchmen”), as a jailhouse informant with a deep-seated fear of the electric chair, makes his short scenes count.

McMillian is a native of Monroeville, Ala., and the film takes note of the fact that its townspeople love to tell Stevenson it’s “home of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ” where author Harper Lee grew up and set her iconic novel about lawyer Atticus Finch. Ironically, one character notes, no one is as eager to point out that Monroe County was a slavery hub. That disconnect gets at the heart of “Just Mercy,” and Foxx’s devastating portrayal of the broken McMillian, so steeped in lifelong inequality that he barely looks surprised when he’s mistakenly and roughly arrested, is guaranteed to stick with you.