The first thing you have to know about Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Just Mercy” is it’s a film with awards-worthy form. Heck, if the Academy won’t recognize it as such, every person who goes to watch it in the cinemas would.
The dramatic biopic centers on a young, idealistic lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, whose first decision out of Harvard is to move to Alabama and provide legal services to the convicts in death row.
Every case he takes on is a life-or-death fight where justice is painstakingly sought in the American penal system—a system riddled with widespread corruption and unexamined racism that strips innocent people of their humanity.
