Shirley review – Regina King rises above dutiful, by-the-numbers biopic
For all its broad strokes, Shirley, the new Netflix biopic on trailblazing politician and erstwhile presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, has a point. Some things are not subtle. The film opens with a visualizer of the House of Representatives in 1968: of the 435 members, only 11 were women, only five Black, and no Black women. Or to put it more starkly: in the official congressional class portrait on the steps of the Capitol, Chisholm (Regina King) is the only Black female face in a sea of grizzled white male visages. The Capitol dome in the background may look obviously CGI-ed, but the image is effective: Chisholm’s mere appearance in the halls of power was radical, her fight steeply uphill.
Said image is also fitting for Shirley, written and directed by John Ridley, which is insightful on Chisholm’s underappreciated significance as the first Black woman to run for president, even if it spells out the story of her groundbreaking 1972 campaign in block letters. For shortly after that portrait, King’s Shirley, speaking with what I have to assume is an accurately light West Indian lilt, proves her mettle in obvious terms by telling off an old white senator who mocks her equal paycheck and demanding a better committee assignment from the speaker of the House, after the freshman rep from Brooklyn gets stuck with agriculture. (Chisholm, neé St Hill, was raised between Bed-Stuy and Barbados, though her pre-politics background is so sparingly and choppily conveyed that you’ll have to consult Wikipedia.)
King imbues Chisholm with a formidable dignity that teeters around some unwieldy declarations. “You better fall in line or you’re going to kill your career before it even gets started!” remarks the speaker to Chisholm’s narrowed eyes. Says Chisholm of the presidential field in late 1971: “What do they all have in common? Middleaged white men!” Or when urged by her staunch, weary advisers – veteran organizers Stanley Townsend (Brian Stokes Mitchell) and Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder (the late Lance Reddick, a standout), and good white boy intern turned burgeoning lawyer Robert Gottlieb (Lucas Hedges) – to tailor her message on abortion, bussing and other issues to different states, Chisholm balks: “And I am notleaving out the nuance!”
Nuance is not quite Shirley’s style, preferring instead the overt and underlined. There’s little foregrounding for why Chisholm decides to run an incredibly longshot campaign dismissed at every turn, other than she feels called by her people and believes in breaking barriers. “You have to be part of the process,” Shirley tells a disillusioned 25year-old Black woman named Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson), who becomes a campaign worker and later congresswoman from California. (The real Lee provides a moving postscript.) There are flashes of more nimble, artful filmmaking – traumatic flashbacks to an assassination attempt, montages conveying a sense of lively community – but Ridley’s direction is overall square, and at times clunky.
The people so often rendered into one-dimensional supporting roles in the traditional male biopic get their obligatory one to two scenes here – Michael Cherrie as Conrad, a man who knows his role as Chisholm’s “shadow” in an untraditional, and uneven, marriage; Regina’s sister Reina King as Chisholm’s sister Muriel St Hill, quietly resentful of Chisholm’s political success, a dynamic which deserved at least twice the time. Amirah Vann plays Diahann Carroll, injecting some cumbersome exposition and 70s Hollywood pizzazz into the proceedings as the link between Chisholm and an endorsement from Huey Newton (Brad James) and the Black Panthers in California. There’s the briefest of suggestions of attraction between Chisholm and adviser Arthur Hardwick Jr (Empire’s Terrence Howard), whom she would eventually marry following a divorce from Conrad in 1977.
Shirley’s dutiful presentation and sunny disposition, even in disappointment, betrayal and defeat, invoke Rustin, Netflix’s biopic starring Colman Domingo as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a political contemporary of Chisholm who, ever the pragmatist, appears in archival footage explaining why Black voters should not support Chisholm at the 1972 Democratic convention. Shirley is similarly focused on recovering and reteaching a legacy everyone ought to know.
But in doing so, Shirley, the person, gets sanded down into Shirley, the ever-composed and wise symbol of what’s possible if you dare to dream. Which is an indisputable message, though at the expense of character. King’s Shirley is ever regal and right, even when, according to every single reason and number provided by her opponents or team, she’s wrong. She’s in contrast to the more bristly, impatient and compelling version portrayed by Uzo Aduba in a superlative episode of the 2020 limited series Mrs America, which also gets deeper into Chisholm’s thorny, at times testy relationship with the women’s lib movement and its largely white leaders.
To be fair, Chisholm was often right, at least on the actual policies. Shirley is at least vindication of what her decision to run, so derided at the time, meant to subsequent generations, in both hopeful and depressing terms. The film is among a handful now seeking to deliver the by-the-numbers biopic treatment to more worthy, overlooked subjects. Shirley gets the job done, though I wish it was more worthy of her complexity.
Shirley is available on Netflix on 22 March
over a decade ago, sick of “all the pigeonholing” that comes with being a woman playing an acoustic guitar. “It’s that thing about slightly rebelling against the last thing you did, or rebelling against yourself,” she says.
Moreover, it was written and recorded while her father was seriously ill. “It’s a thing that’s been going on for the last five years, walking with that anticipatory grief,” she says. He died in August. “When I got in touch with John, maybe it was a cry for help, but I thought, I just want to work outside Manchester, go somewhere completely different, escape for a while and see what comes out. My way of doing production, I live and breathe an album for three years – the studio’s just around the corner from where I live. Maybe subconsciously I needed help this time.”
The title, she says, comes from “looking under rocks and stones for the happy things. I realise now that last year, when things were going badly, I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time looking out of the window in the morning at the birds in the trees. Looking at simple things in nature, like motifs or signs that everything’s fine – it brought home to me that you still have to live, you still have to appreciate these things.” Weaver says the results are “more direct and exposed”, although such things are relative: she deliberately “randomised” her lyrics, cutting and pasting words in text documents, feeding songs through Google Translate twice – first into a foreign language then back into English – until they had the quality of “subtitles on a French film, where if you can understand a bit of French you realise they’re not actually saying what it says”.
“You don’t want to write too much about yourself,” she says. “I’d rather write about scenarios and characters and dress them up.”
It’s another entry in what one critic called Weaver’s “hermetically sealed” world. Her music has occasionally intersected with the mainstream – Coldplay sampled her track Silver Chord on their album Ghost Stories; her songs have turned up on the soundtracks of Killing Eve and the recent Zac Efron vehicle Ricky Stanicky – but for the most part she and music seem to exist in their own universe. The impression of an artist slightly apart is bolstered by the fact that she is also a one-woman cottage industry, driving herself and her band to gigs, even if it involves a 12hour journey down the US west coast, and holding forth about the disastrous effect of Brexit on underground musicians’ ability to tour Europe.
While she is signed to Fire, she also runs her own label, Bird, which concentrates exclusively on female artists, some rescued by Weaver from the dustbin of history. At Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown festival in 2007, she curated a night of “the Lost Ladies of Folk”, which featured dimly remembered late 60s singer-songwriters Bonnie Dobson, Wendy Flower and Susan Christie alongside Cate Le Bon and Weaver, then heavily pregnant. The motivation behind starting the label, she says, came after seeing “my female friends just dropping out of music while all my male peers seemed to be going from strength to strength … no – we must carry on, we must prevail!”
It’s an approach that doubtless has something to do with Weaver’s early career: a tumultuous round of disappointments, tragedy and bruising encounters with the music industry. Her first band, the Britpoppy Kill Laura, endured an unhappy relationship with a major label. After they split up, she was signed as a solo artist by New Order manager Rob Gretton’s label, but Gretton died suddenly of a heart attack before her album could be released. She was offered a solo deal by a major label, but it was withdrawn just as she was about to play a showcase gig for them; it transpired the label’s representatives weren’t there anyway, having decided it was “too awkward” under the circumstances.
By the early 00s, she was fronting the alternately psychedelic and folky quartet Misty Dixon, part of the collective of Manchester artists around the Twisted Nerve label, founded by Badly Drawn Boy and Weaver’s partner, the musician/DJ/graphic designer Andy Votel. The band were finishing their debut album when guitarist Dave Tyack vanished on a walking holiday in Corsica. “We went to look for him, driving around in a Twingo hire car, putting up posters, speaking to the gendarmerie, going into bars in remote villages – you’d walk in and all these guys would turn around, no teeth, wearing necklaces with gold machine guns hanging from them. You’d explain why you were there, and one guy at the end of the bar would start laughing, like in a film. We just kept thinking he was alive, because he was only in his early 20s, we’d just seen him at a friend’s wedding before he left – but he’d already died.” Tyack’s remains were found in 2004; he had apparently fallen to his death.
Weaver subsequently went her own way, resuming her solo career, attracting critical attention with 2010’s The Fallen By Watchbird, an album accompanied by a book of Weaver-penned fairytales. What she calls her “indie breakthrough” came with 2014’s cosmic, driving, synth-heavy The Silver Globe, an album on which she says she effectively returned to the music of her youth. “I grew up in Widnes, and it’s the kind of place where you have to really seek out different people. There were hippies, bikers, punks, goths, this massive group of alternative people that I found when I was in sixth form, so I was listening to Gong, the Pink Fairies, Hawkwind. I got into the free-festival movement, driving in this shitty Datsun to the Lake District in a convoy with people who lived in double-decker buses, watching those kind of festival bands. It was exciting, there was a utopian, beautiful side to it, but the practicalities of it were brutal.”
Reading a history of metal on a recent holiday made Weaver think about growing up in Widnes again. The first single she ever bought was Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills (“although I think the second was by Kim Wilde”) and there were a lot of metalheads in her teenage gang; they used to go and see Slayer and Metallica together. She has been idly wondering about making a heavy metal album. “I don’t think I could go there,” she sighs. “You’ve got to be an amazing guitarist to do all that … shredding.”
Anyway, before the next project, she has to work out how she’s going to present Love in Constant Spectacle live: “I love all that post-production, thinking about costumes, getting filmmakers to do visuals.” She has done some curious gigs before – she elected to perform 2019’s Loops in the Secret Society completely solo, cutting vinyl dubplates, playing them on a turntable and improvising over them on a bank of synths, “like Rick Wakeman” – but Love in Constant Spectacle feels different. “It’s not that kind of atmosphere-y space rock sound.”
But she has some suitably Jane Weaver-ish ideas, the product of another recent trip down the rabbit hole. “A lot of these new Christian churches in America have these amazing displays of light boxes, like LED things. Apparently it’s a thing over there: fabulous light displays in churches.”
She seems to be thinking out loud. “That would be transportable, too. It would go in the van. Maybe I’ll do that.”
• Love in Constant Spectacle is released on Fire on 5 April
I got into the freefestival movement, driving to the Lake District with people who lived in doubledecker buses