Metacritic reviews

While “Shirley” is no “Rustin,” cinematically, Chisholm, like Bayard Rustin, more than deserves her flowers.

In “Shirley,” John Ridley’s sharp and lively inside-political docudrama, Regina King plays Shirley Chisholm with a quiet force you can’t look away from.

Writer-director John Ridley and star Regina King get right to it in the Netflix original film “Shirley,” a no-frills, straightforward and inspirational biopic of the iconic and pioneering Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress and the first Black candidate for a major party nomination for president.

It may be conventional but it’s never uninteresting, thanks to King and a strong ensemble in the key roles. And no one could argue with its value in bringing Chisholm’s achievements to the attention of younger generations perhaps unfamiliar with her legacy.

As a character study, it repeatedly points out contradictions in Chisholm that it refuses to interrogate for fear it will come off as critical. The result is a hagiography with some obvious holes, something that a better film might try to balance.

In the end, this sub-Sorkin-esque political potboiler sidelines Chisholm's most meaningful community work to the fact that she tried and failed to run for president.

For whatever faults she had as a candidate, Chisholm earned her paragraph in the annals of our democracy, and “Shirley” does a conscientious job of fleshing out her story.

Despite an impressive pedigree in front of and behind the camera, “Shirley” fails to convey just how remarkable the career of Shirley Chisholm really was. The problem isn’t the narrow focus on one of her accomplishments, it’s the even narrower depiction of who she was as a person.

King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.

We never get the chance to see what inspired Chisholm’s political fire or her personal problems — mostly, that’s left to exposition-heavy dialogue from other characters — and even the machinations and calculations behind her presidential run are left far to the side.