98 min | PG | July 3, 2020 | Magnolia Pictures
John Lewis spends a lifetime getting arrested on purpose and calls it good trouble. Dawn Porter follows the civil-rights icon as the voting fight he bled for in 1965 comes back to court. The film loves him too much to challenge him.
John Lewis sits across from the camera and recounts a life spent getting arrested on purpose. He marches at Selma. He bleeds on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He turns that beating into a forty-year career in Congress and a phrase he repeats like scripture: get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Dawn Porter builds the film around Lewis in the present, an old man watching his life’s work get litigated again in courtrooms over voter rolls and gerrymandered districts. The film is less a biography than an argument that the fight Lewis joined in 1965 never actually ended.
Lewis carries the film because he refuses to perform sainthood. He cracks jokes about his own arrest record. He dances badly in his office to make a point about joy. He looks at archival footage of his younger self and reacts with something closer to grief than nostalgia. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams appear to position Lewis as a bridge to a new generation of organizers. Their testimony works best when it stays specific about voter suppression and worst when it slides into the kind of reverence that flattens Lewis into a monument.
Porter directs a documentary that trusts its subject more than its form. She intercuts the present-day Lewis with newly colorized archival footage of the 1960s movement, and the color makes the old marches feel immediate rather than historical. The structure abandons chronology and organizes the film around themes like voting rights and family. That choice keeps Lewis at the center but leaves the timeline muddy. The film reaches for icon when it would land harder by staying with the man.
This is a respectful portrait of a man who earned every bit of the respect. It is also a film that knows exactly what it wants you to feel and never risks complicating that feeling. Lewis deserves the attention, and the voting-rights argument running underneath the tribute is the most urgent thing here. The problem is that Porter treats Lewis as settled history when his fight is still in dispute. The result honors the legend and underserves the question.