Shirley review – Regina King rises above dutiful, by-the-numbers biopic

For all its broad strokes, Shirley, the new Netflix biopic on trailblazing politician and erstwhile presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, has a point. Some things are not subtle. The film opens with a visualizer of the House of Representatives in 1968: of the 435 members, only 11 were women, only five Black, and no Black women. Or to put it more starkly: in the official congressional class portrait on the steps of the Capitol, Chisholm (Regina King) is the only Black female face in a sea of grizzled white male visages. The Capitol dome in the background may look obviously CGI-ed, but the image is effective: Chisholm’s mere appearance in the halls of power was radical, her fight steeply uphill.

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Said image is also fitting for Shirley, written and directed by John Ridley, which is insightful on Chisholm’s underappreciated significance as the first Black woman to run for president, even if it spells out the story of her groundbreaking 1972 campaign in block letters. For shortly after that portrait, King’s Shirley, speaking with what I have to assume is an accurately light West Indian lilt, proves her mettle in obvious terms by telling off an old white senator who mocks her equal paycheck and demanding a better committee assignment from the speaker of the House, after the freshman rep from Brooklyn gets stuck with agriculture. (Chisholm, neé St Hill, was raised between Bed-Stuy and Barbados, though her pre-politics background is so sparingly and choppily conveyed that you’ll have to consult Wikipedia.)

King imbues Chisholm with a formidable dignity that teeters around some unwieldy declarations. “You better fall in line or you’re going to kill your career before it even gets started!” remarks the speaker to Chisholm’s narrowed eyes. Says Chisholm of the presidential field in late 1971: “What do they all have in common? Middle-aged white men!” Or when urged by her staunch, weary advisers – veteran organizers Stanley Townsend (Brian Stokes Mitchell) and Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder (the late Lance Reddick, a standout), and good white boy intern turned burgeoning lawyer Robert Gottlieb (Lucas Hedges) – to tailor her message on abortion, bussing and other issues to different states, Chisholm balks: “And I am not leaving out the nuance!”

Nuance is not quite Shirley’s style, preferring instead the overt and underlined. There’s little foregrounding for why Chisholm decides to run an incredibly longshot campaign dismissed at every turn, other than she feels called by her people and believes in breaking barriers. “You have to be part of the process,” Shirley tells a disillusioned 25-year-old Black woman named Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson), who becomes a campaign worker and later congresswoman from California. (The real Lee provides a moving postscript.) There are flashes of more nimble, artful film-making – traumatic flashbacks to an assassination attempt, montages conveying a sense of lively community – but Ridley’s direction is overall square, and at times clunky.

The people so often rendered into one-dimensional supporting roles in the traditional male biopic get their obligatory one to two scenes here – Michael Cherrie as Conrad, a man who knows his role as Chisholm’s “shadow” in an untraditional, and uneven, marriage; Regina’s sister Reina King as Chisholm’s sister Muriel St Hill, quietly resentful of Chisholm’s political success, a dynamic which deserved at least twice the time. Amirah Vann plays Diahann Carroll, injecting some cumbersome exposition and 70s Hollywood pizzazz into the proceedings as the link between Chisholm and an endorsement from Huey Newton (Brad James) and the Black Panthers in California. There’s the briefest of suggestions of attraction between Chisholm and adviser Arthur Hardwick Jr (Empire’s Terrence Howard), whom she would eventually marry following a divorce from Conrad in 1977.

Shirley’s dutiful presentation and sunny disposition, even in disappointment, betrayal and defeat, invoke Rustin, Netflix’s biopic starring Colman Domingo as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a political contemporary of Chisholm who, ever the pragmatist, appears in archival footage explaining why Black voters should not support Chisholm at the 1972 Democratic convention. Shirley is similarly focused on recovering and reteaching a legacy everyone ought to know.

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But in doing so, Shirley, the person, gets sanded down into Shirley, the ever-composed and wise symbol of what’s possible if you dare to dream. Which is an indisputable message, though at the expense of character. King’s Shirley is ever regal and right, even when, according to every single reason and number provided by her opponents or team, she’s wrong. She’s in contrast to the more bristly, impatient and compelling version portrayed by Uzo Aduba in a superlative episode of the 2020 limited series Mrs America, which also gets deeper into Chisholm’s thorny, at times testy relationship with the women’s lib movement and its largely white leaders.

To be fair, Chisholm was often right, at least on the actual policies. Shirley is at least vindication of what her decision to run, so derided at the time, meant to subsequent generations, in both hopeful and depressing terms. The film is among a handful now seeking to deliver the by-the-numbers biopic treatment to more worthy, overlooked subjects. Shirley gets the job done, though I wish it was more worthy of her complexity.

• Shirley is available on Netflix on 22 March