Loving

Richard and Mildred Loving just wanted to be an ordinary couple, which is precisely what made them so extraordinary. And although it takes place more than a half century ago, in many ways Loving feels ripped from today’s headlines.

Indeed, with its examination of socioeconomic class, police profiling and political impositions on working-class families, there’s plenty of contemporary relevance in the true-life struggle of an interracial Virginia couple who just wanted to be married.

In the hands of versatile director Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special), their story is provocative and poignant, bolstered by strong performances and an evocative sense of time and place.

It’s 1958, to be exact, when mild-mannered laborer Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) marries Mildred (Ruth Negga) before being hauled to jail a few weeks later for violating the Racial Integrity Act. After he’s bailed out, the couple agrees to move to Washington, D.C., with their children, by a court order.

That keeps the authorities at bay, but separates the Lovings from their relatives and their dreams of owning land in their native state. At Mildred’s urging, they allow an ALCU attorney (Nick Kroll) to defend them all the way to the Supreme Court. Along the way, their transformation into reluctant civil-rights crusaders tests the depth and boundaries of their relationship.

Within its dynamic historical backdrop — although it deliberately ignores world affairs during that time — the film is a testament to the bonds of marriage that compensates for its predictability by largely avoiding cheap sentiment and melodramatic clichés.

The sharply crafted screenplay by Nichols is deliberately paced but quietly powerful as it takes an incisive look at a culture of systemic racism and attempts to impose closed-minded value systems as a method of blatant segregation. Yet for a film with a landmark legal case at its center, it doesn’t turn into a standard procedural.

Edgerton (The Gift) and Negga (World War Z) reward the film’s character-driven approach with a chemistry that conveys a genuine affection between Richard and Mildred even though there’s little context about how they met or why they love each other in the first place. The understated portrayals are so convincing that such details become irrelevant.

The film shines a deserving spotlight on an infuriating case of injustice. It might even cause us to re-examine our past in the context of our future.

Rated PG-13, 123 minutes.