Like any successful politician, John Lewis has a supply of anecdotes and applause lines to pull out whenever he is needed. And according to Dawn Porter’s documentary “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” he is needed a lot. One of the go-to bits we hear in the movie involves a memory from his childhood on a farm where, as a deeply religious and studious boy, he would preach to the family chickens. They would nod along, he says, but could never quite get to “Amen.” He more frequently pulls out a line that serves as his call to action. Arrested dozens of times over his career, Lewis cites the need for people to get into what he calls “Necessary trouble. Good trouble” in order to enact change.
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A near-universally beloved icon of the Civil Rights movement, long-time Georgia congressman Lewis comes across in the movie as having embraced that status comfortably without letting it encase him in amber. The Lewis who Porter sometimes shows talking straight to the camera or watching footage of himself at the various protest altercations that have defined his legacy is much the same Lewis who she captures out in the world. Measured and somewhat hypnotic in his speech, he chooses his words carefully, drawing you in close to hear what he has to say.
His message has been much the same since he first got involved in politics in the 1950s. Having sent a letter to Martin Luther King, Jr.—who later referred to Lewis as “that boy from Troy”—he started out protesting segregation and Black voter intimidation in the South and has not stopped since. That same highly serious kid (his sister remembers him wearing a tie and carrying a bible to high school) who preached to chickens brought a stolid moral determination to his training in the philosophy and tactics of non-violent protest.
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Some of the most affecting passages in the movie show Lewis reacting to the footage of the many times he was beaten and bloodied. One photo from the 1963 march on Selma, blown up to wall-size, shows him on the ground, dazed and confused after he and other marchers had been assaulted by a phalanx of nightstick-wielding cops. “I thought I was going to die on that bridge,” Lewis says quietly and matter-of-factly, without any affectation of either bravery or martyrdom. “When you lose your sense of fear, you’re free.” Porter makes clear that his insistence on nonviolence, though, was in fact the braver and tougher response. His friend and ally Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) chuckles darkly at Lewis’s staunch refusal to respond when he was being beaten at a lunch counter sit-in or as a Freedom Rider in 1961, saying that he probably wouldn’t have been able to hold himself back.
His willingness to put himself in harm’s way time and again is part of what makes Lewis such a strong draw out in public. A good part of Porter’s movie is simply capturing the people who come to him, whether at an event or just out on the street, their eyes agleam at meeting this small, sturdy, resolute hero. Watching him work the crowd at a rally for Texas representative Colin Allred, or fire up a mass audience cheering on Stacy Abrams in her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, is to see what decades of organizing, dedication, and purpose can deliver.
At its best, “John Lewis: Good Trouble” is a portrait in courage that pairs the past with the present. She explicitly draws the same comparisons that Lewis does between Southern states’ attempts to keep Black people from voting in the Jim Crow era to the present-day Republican strategy of disenfranchisement (voter ID laws, closing polling places in minority neighborhoods). Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) makes the point that “we are still in the Civil Rights movement.”
But too often the movie misses the chance to dig deeper into those issues and remains stalled at the glowing portraiture stage. Feeling very similar in tone to Magnolia’s enjoyable but similarly simplistic “RGB,” this documentary does not have the grit or texture of Porter’s more powerful work—from “Trapped,” her passionate exploration of the right’s anti-choice crusade, to her heartbreaking miniseries “Bobby Kennedy for President.”
There’s a curious detail that Porter throws in near the end of her movie. Departing briefly from its mostly chummy tone, she includes a short segment on Lewis’s bruising 1986 campaign against his fellow Civil Rights icon and good friend Julian Bond. Lewis won the race but only after deploying a borderline dirty trick (taking a drug test and demanding Bond do the same). It’s a potentially insightful look into how a crusader moves from the outside to the inside. But rather than trying to link that brief glimpse of Lewis’s tough and pragmatic side to his legislative record, the movie pivots back to simply running a list of the legislation. If “John Lewis: Good Trouble” proves anything it is that his subject is tough. He deserves a tougher movie. [B-]
“John Lewis: Good Trouble” opens theatrically and OnDemand on July 3.