But I must say, Selma is not a good movie. I wish it was. If movies are magic (and I believe they are) Duvernay hasn’t mastered more than entry level tricks. Her style suffers from no sleight of hand, and her tricks of camera and editing are anything but invisible. Watching Selma mirrors the bombastic experience of an old melodrama, where every emotion, plot turn, and character is played as loudly, stupidly, and in your face as possible. It is style aimed at one purpose: to provoke you any way it can, and quality be damned if the filmmakers feel guilty about it. Selma is a very good, sometimes overwhelming and often powerful TV movie that seems to have shown a fake ID to sneak into the theater. Ugly, cheap lighting can’t treat its production design with a cinematic bravado nearly equal to the monumental story Selma nobly limps through telling.

Trips to the White House, Selma, an iconic bridge, and the King household, fail to form an authentic world for Martin Luther King Jr. to inhabit. Camera setups rigidly follow the rules taught to first year film school students, and never is there a doubt DuVernay is an alum of abc’s political soap opera Scandal. It doesn’t matter that most audience members might not pay attention to how the camera’s moving or how poetic a lighting choice is, because those are the choices that are in dialogue with the viewer, that presents material that asks viewer to take a step forward, to suspend their disbelief, and put their trust in a power bigger than themselves. The movies show that the right director, with the right writer, with the right cast, and the right production team can make cinema into a borderline religious experience to be universally shared, discussed, recounted, and embraced. It is a sadness that Selma can’t be more than a little movie about a huge topic, and doesn’t come close to what it should have been.

But DuVernay’s lack of cinematic elegance and tact—a B-rate television director if there ever was one—can’t get in the way of a story this inherently powerful. The tale at the core of Selma is to movies what mountains are to cinematographers, that is, the content being captured (in this case dramatized) is so powerful, so striking, it would take a natural disaster of a director to sabotage it. I hazard if Ferguson didn’t explode how it did (along with a multitude of other examples), Selma wouldn’t strike such a resonant chord. Its current standing 99% on Rotten Tomatoes seems equally unlikely. But those things did happen, and it does have a 99%, and at no point watching do you question why. Movies cannot be made or watched in a vacuum. Selma resoundingly proves why.