Selma's refreshing portrayal of leadership

Modern liberalism has a bit of a hero problem, a tendency to attribute change to strong individual personalities rather than structural factors. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is the massive difference in left-leaning voter turnout between presidential and midterm elections. From about 58 percent in 2012, overall turnout fell to 36 percent in 2014, led by steep drops in demographics friendly to the Democratic Party. Democrats won the first election, and were trounced in the second. There are many causes for this discrepancy, but the biggest one is that there was no Obama at the head of the ticket.

This brings me to Selma, the new film about Martin Luther King, the Selma to Montgomery March, Bloody Sunday, and the Voting Rights Act. It's a splendid piece of filmmaking, but it also works surprisingly well on a political level. More often than not, movies and TV shows have a tin ear for politics, but this is a piece of mass-market art that is perfectly pitched to the current political moment.

Partly this is due to the coincidence of ongoing demonstrations against police brutality and general racial injustice. But it is also due to Selma's portrayal of leadership. The way Selma treats the principal political actors of the story, King and President Lyndon Johnson, results in a nuanced and badly needed portrait of leadership — ironically, by taking some of the heroic shine off both figures.

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First, let's look at King. While he is the protagonist of the film and comes off as a hugely impressive person, he is not shown as omnipotent or even terribly sure of himself. He is clearly afraid for his life, justifiably so. The crushing pressure repeatedly gets to him, and the reassurance of lieutenants and friends is necessary to keep his spirits up.

The murders of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson and the white clergyman James Reeb tear at King's heart and conscience, and he finds it difficult to proceed. He stops the second attempt at a march from Selma to Montgomery on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, afraid it is a trap. In a late-night drive, he tells John Lewis he is going to cancel the planned following march, but Lewis talks him out of it.

King's spectacular oratorical gifts (ably imitated by British actor David Oyelowo, though he does not quite reach the mesmerizing charisma of the real thing) are correctly shown as hugely energizing and inspiring, and his brilliant political sense is similarly demonstrated. But the genius of Selma is to show how Martin Luther King depended on many, many people. From friends like Ralph Abernathy, to fellow leaders like Lewis, to rank-and-file activists who were being beaten and murdered trying to win their political rights, King the icon was in large part a collective creation.

It's an excellent reminder that national heroes do not spring into being fully formed — they require personal support and political backing.

Then there's Johnson (portrayed splendidly by a foul-mouthed Tom Wilkinson). For most of the movie, he is shown as the primary antagonist of King and his movement. The brutal, dim-bulb racist Sheriff Clark is the sharp end of the Jim Crow system, but it's LBJ who has the power to create and help pass the Voting Rights Act that King wants. Convincing Johnson to come around is the organizing structure of the movie.

Now, it's true that LBJ doesn't get a completely fair treatment by the lights of history. In particular, he is seen siccing J. Edgar Hoover on MLK, a prelude to the infamous suicide letter to King's house, an event that occurred long before the Selma marches and not on the orders of Johnson.

However, as Matt Yglesias writes, taken as a whole Selma is also sympathetic toward LBJ. After constant pressure from King and the movement, Johnson eventually takes their side. In a confrontation with villainous Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the president loses his calm: "I'll be damned if I'm going to let history put me in the same place as the likes of you." One of the last scenes of the movie shows his speech on the Voting Rights Act, in which he famously quotes the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, "We Shall Overcome."

Granting some poetic license to make a better movie, the political-historical message is the correct one: LBJ, even with his mastery of legislative politics, needed the grassroots strength of King and the movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, one of his finest accomplishments. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said, all great American presidents had to be forced into greatness.

And as Tony Benn once put it: "Every generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no destination called 'justice' or 'democracy' and if you catch a train driven by the right man you'll get there." For those invested in civil rights in 2016 and beyond, Selma is a movie to watch.

Correction: This article originally misstated the state that George Wallace governed. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.