139 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
Two Navy pilots fly off the same carrier into the Korean War. One is the first Black aviator the Navy ever trained, and the war is the easy part. The hard part is everything that happens before the planes leave the ground.
Jesse Brown is the first Black aviator in the United States Navy. Thomas Hudner is the white wingman assigned to fly beside him. The film follows their squadron from stateside training through the brutal air war over the Chosin Reservoir. It treats the cockpit as the safest place either man occupies. The real combat happens in officers’ clubs and on tarmacs, where Brown fights a service that needs him to fail and a partner who wants to help in ways that insult him. This is a movie about the specific exhaustion of being the first, and the way good intentions arrive as their own kind of weight.
Jonathan Majors plays Brown as a man who has armored himself against every slight he knows is coming. He stands in front of a mirror and repeats the slurs hurled at him to inoculate himself against them. Majors keeps Brown’s interior locked tight, and the few moments the guard drops land hard because of it. Glen Powell plays Hudner with an earnest decency that the film refuses to let off easy. Powell shows a man who wants to be the good white officer and slowly learns that wanting it is not enough. Christina Jackson plays Daisy Brown as the one person who sees her husband whole, and the marriage scenes give the war stakes a face.
J.D. Dillard directs the flying sequences with a clarity that favors physical aircraft and weight over digital chaos. The propeller-driven Corsairs feel heavy and analog, and the camera stays close enough to register the strain of pulling out of a dive. Dillard and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoot the carrier deck in cold blues that make the Korean cold feel earned. The script by Jake Crane and Jonathan A. Stewart structures the film as a slow build, and the pacing sags through the middle stretch of training and downtime. The conventional biopic beats are all present and accounted for, and Dillard hits them with sincerity rather than invention.
Devotion is a handsome, respectful telling of a story that deserves the respect. It trusts its two lead performances to carry the weight, and they do. The film never finds a formal idea bold enough to match Majors’ work, and it settles into the familiar rhythms of the prestige war picture when it could have pushed harder. What stays is the central relationship and the honesty about how unequal it is, even between two men willing to die for each other. The movie knows that friendship across that gap is a real thing and a complicated one, and it refuses to pretend otherwise.