Well-acted and painfully earnest, 'Just Mercy' is Oscar bait of another era

The legal drama “Just Mercy” is the sort of heart-in-the-right-place movie that would have been a shoo-in for Academy Award glory a decade ago. The fact that it’s not in the award conversation, despite a powerhouse cast, says a lot about the changing landscape of prestige pictures.

Based on a true story, the movie follows the fortunes of Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan). We first meet Bryan as an eager law student at Harvard, working a summer internship in Georgia for a group trying to provide legal help to death-row inmates. The experience helps guide Bryan’s future, to use his law degree to do the most good.

Two years later, in 1992, a freshly graduated Bryan is leaving his family in Delaware to move to Alabama. With a federal grant and the support of an anti-death-penalty activist, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), Bryan sets up the Equal Justice Initiative, to provide legal aid to soon-to-be-executed inmates.

Bryan isn’t given a warm welcome upon arrival. The landlord Eva paid for office space backs out at the last minute, leaving Bryan to do his office work in Eva’s living room. And the guards at the state penitentiary order Bryan to a strip-search on his first visit — something other attorneys never have to do. Bryan maintains his composure, but Jordan shows the simmering anger underneath.

One case in particular draws Bryan’s attention: Walter “Johnnie D” McMillan (played by Jamie Foxx), facing execution for the murder of an 18-year-old white woman in 1986. Bryan quickly discovers there was no evidence linking McMillan to the crime, plenty of witnesses who could testify McMillan was elsewhere at the time of the murder, and the state’s only witness was a criminal (Tim Blake Nelson) who only avoided Death Row himself by testifying against McMillan.

Bryan confronts the racist sheriff (Michael Harding), a district attorney (Rafe Spall) unwilling to open old wounds, and a judicial system stacked against the convicted — especially when they’re black. That racism is so engrained in the Alabama psyche that McMillan himself tells Bryan, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into here in Alabama … when you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.”

Director Destin Daniel Cretton (who helmed Larson in “Short Term 12” and “The Glass Castle”) — who co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Lanham, adapting Stevenson’s memoir — finds its most moving passages in the conversations between Bryan and Johnnie D, as the young lawyer shows respect to the condemned man’s dignity and gives the inmate a glimmer of hope. Equally moving are the scenes of Johnnie D in the cellblock, talking to other inmates (played by Rob Morgan and O’Shea Jackson Jr.) who know their days are numbered, too.

If only those scenes were enough to counter the by-the-numbers moments of predictably lofty courtroom speeches and one-dimensional racists in pickup trucks. That’s where, I think, “Just Mercy” misses out on the next-level appreciation that an issue-driven movie like this once would have gotten from Oscar voters. As good as the performances by Jordan and Foxx are, the eat-your-vegetables feel of the inspirational dialogue and change-the-world narrative hold the movie back. 

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‘Just Mercy’

★★★

Opened December 25 in select cities; opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic content including some racial epithets. Running time: 137 minutes.