'Selma' a history lesson that resonates with the present.

• Author: Coyle, Jake
• Position: Living

Byline: Jake Coyle

'Selma'

1/2

A Paramount Pictures release

Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material, including violence, a suggestive moment, and brief strong language

Running time: Two hours, 7 minutes

To say Ava DuVernay's "Selma'' feels relevant is a mammoth understatement. It's altogether animated, propelled and enlivened by its contemporary urgency. "Selma'' is a history lesson that throbs with today.

DuVernay, a former publicist with two low-budget dramas to her name, dramatizes the events around the 1965 Civil Rights march through Alabama, from Selma to Montgomery, with a straightness of purpose befitting the famous protest's direct path.

Hollywood often doesn't nail this kind of historical drama, and such films frequently sag under the weight of their intentions. But DuVernay, working from a script by Paul Webb, stays away from the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic this might have been. Eluding myth-making, she instead goes for a focused realism. "Selma'' captures a movement, from the grass roots to the White House, and the many it takes to move history.

"Selma'' would pair well with Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln,'' another atmospheric telling of history that cast an expansive gaze at the not-always-pretty grunt work that enabled the world to change.

Early in the film, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference tries to check into a Selma hotel, and a white man extends his hand only to clock King in the jaw. "This place,'' says one of King's cohorts, "is perfect.''

This is the Deep South after 1964's landmark Civil Rights Act, but when poll taxes, vouchers and the like kept black people away from the ballot box. In an early scene, an elderly hospice nurse named Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) tries to register to vote, only be to be warned of "startin' a fuss.'' She's told to name Alabama's 67 judges.

King's group arrives in Selma having just waged an unsuccessful campaign in Albany, Georgia, where the police avoided the kind of confrontations that would draw headlines. The toxic discrimination of Selma, though, offers King the "drama'' he requires to elevate the cause to front pages. Selma Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston) and Alabama Governor George Wallace (an excellent Tim Roth) supply the racist brutality that plays right into King's mission.

A central theater of "Selma'' isn't just the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where marchers were brutally beaten by baton-wielding police -- it's in the White House. King strategy is trying to...