Pop outsider sustaining success at steady pace

An invitation to visit Pink in Venice, California, for a home-cooked dinner could seem like a contrived play for authenticity.

But it’s hard to remain skeptical when faced with a giggling baby.

Faux-intimate or not, the domestic scene featuring Top 40’s long-reigning rebel was disarmingly unpolished: an entryway cluttered with roller skates, stuffed animals, kites and bike helmets; a chicken in the oven; and the singer’s second child, 9-month-old Jameson, making only a moderate mess with his spoon-fed mush. (The 6-year-old Willow was elsewhere with her father, the former motocross racer Carey Hart.)

Pink, who has spent nearly two decades selling her relative edge and honesty from within the pop machine, isn’t quite Martha Stewart. She wore tattoo-baring overalls and diamond earrings as she passed the baby (named for the whiskey) to his nanny and began dressing a salad with the uncertainty of a 20-something hosting her first dinner party.

Such is the life of a welladjusted veteran star who isn’t quite sure how she has survived so long and remained sane. A vestige of the Y2K, peak-CD, MTV “TRL” generation, Pink, now 38, hasn’t melted down or ever really gone away — a fact she owes to never having been “the one.”

“I’ve never won the popularity contest,” she said over the roasted chicken and vegetables she declared “mostly cooked.” “I was never as big as Britney or Christina.”

She hasn’t been ignored, though, nor has she burrowed in a niche.

Since her debut, “Can’t Take Me Home” (2000), Pink has sold more than 16 million

“Marshall” is a serious movie, but it’s not preachy or didactic.

Rather, it tells its 20thcentury story by reviving a sure-fire 20th-century form: the courtroom drama.

The year is 1941, and Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) is a lawyer for the NAACP. In fact, he’s the lawyer for the NAACP, so he travels constantly, providing legal counsel to black Americans wrongly accused of serious crimes.

Unlike other criminaldefense lawyers, he defends only innocent people. It’s hard, uphill work — and, in addition to the rigors of the court, he has to deal with racists and threats of physical violence.

The story of “Marshall” centers on a court case in Connecticut in which a rich, white woman (Kate Hudson) claims that her black chauffeur raped her twice and tried to kill her by throwing her off a bridge.

Meanwhile, the chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) maintains that he had no contact with the woman, that the claims are entirely false.

In the woman’s favor is not only the fact that she’s white and rich, but the obvious question: Why would she lie? And working against the man is not only his race but also the fact that he has a dishonorable discharge from the military and a history of stealing from his previous employer.

So Marshall and his partner on this case, Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), have all that to deal with, plus a hostile judge (James Cromwell) and an enraged community that just assumes the chauffeur is guilty.

“Marshall” revisits such serious history that it feels almost disrespectful to talk about it as a fun movie, but it is fun. The court case has many sides to it — something of a puzzle for the audience, as well as the characters, to work out.

The film has no dull scenes. And, as played by Boseman and Gad, Marshall and Friedman complement each other well, a la a buddy movie — one fit and one heavy, one black and one white, one tall and one short, one calm and one stressed — but both Americans working together in a just cause.

Like its title character, “Marshall” remains breezy

and engaging, never losing focus on its higher purpose. The movie reminds us that, although much of American life is ruled, as it should be, by majority opinion, juries must reach their decisions not through gut feeling or uninformed impulse but by the application of the laws and the evidence.

In this way, the courts have been central not only to the preservation of American freedom but to its expansion.

“Marshall” is yet another example of a movie made more than a year ago but one that feels tailored to the specific concerns of this particular time.

It’s uncanny the way good movies know what’s coming before it happens, know what to say and know what people need to hear.