Regina King plays the first Black woman elected to Congress in John Ridley’s biopic, which follows her underfunded 1972 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination from Brooklyn to the convention floor in Miami Beach.

Shirley is a 2024 biographical drama written and directed by John Ridley about the 1972 presidential campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. Regina King plays the title role. The film, a Netflix original, opened in a small number of American cinemas on 15 March 2024 before its streaming premiere on Netflix on 22 March 2024. It runs 117 minutes and concentrates on a single year: the long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination that Chisholm launched from Brooklyn and carried all the way to the national convention in Miami Beach.

The story begins shortly after Chisholm reaches Washington, having won her seat in a Brooklyn district in 1968. She clashes with the institution from the start: as a newcomer she is placed on an agriculture committee even though she represents an urban district, and she is told that new members are expected to wait their turn. The film then moves to Christmas 1971, when her supporters raise twice the money she asked them for to put her name on the ballot, and Chisholm decides to run for president.

A campaign seen from the inside

Her inner circle is small. Her husband, Conrad Chisholm, played by Michael Cherrie, takes charge of her security; Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder, her veteran political adviser, is played by Lance Reddick; and Arthur Hardwick Jr., who looks after the money, is played by Terrence Howard. To that group she adds Robert Gottlieb, played by Lucas Hedges, a Cornell student she recruits as national student coordinator at a moment when 18-year-olds have just won the right to vote, and Stanley Townsend, played by Brian Stokes Mitchell, as campaign manager. Christina Jackson plays the young Barbara Lee, who would later serve in Congress herself, and Reina King plays Chisholm’s sister, Muriel St. Hill.

The middle of the film follows the campaign’s practical problems. Short of time and money, Chisholm skips several states. After a weak result in Florida she agrees to stay out of the District of Columbia vote so as not to split it with Walter Fauntroy, played by André Holland, who promises to hand her his delegates later. When NBC, ABC and CBS leave her out of the televised debates, Gottlieb, by then a law student, takes the networks to court. Meanwhile, a planned New York Times profile exposes a rift with her sisters, a fundraiser ends with most of the donations missing, and Townsend’s angry exit ends with Chisholm firing him.

The final stretch takes the campaign to California. The ruling against the networks gives Chisholm her airtime and the Black Panthers endorse her, but she loses the winner-takes-all primary. Fauntroy then drops out without passing on his delegates as promised, and Ron Dellums, played by Dorian Missick, withdraws his endorsement as the party gathers behind George McGovern. In the film’s account, Chisholm decides to give her remaining delegates to McGovern and closes the campaign with a statement presenting it as a catalyst for change. The story stops there, on a defeat, with a closing note on her later years in Congress.

What happened in 1972

The real campaign gives the film its frame. Chisholm formally announced her candidacy on 25 January 1972 in a Baptist church in her Brooklyn district, calling for a bloodless revolution at the Democratic convention. She became the first Black candidate to seek a major party’s presidential nomination and the first woman to run for the Democratic one; Margaret Chase Smith had sought the Republican nomination in 1964. Her slogan, Unbought and Unbossed, was also the title of her 1970 autobiography, and the whole campaign spent around $300,000.

The results were modest. She finished seventh in Florida on 14 March with 3.5% of the vote, took 157,435 votes and 4.4% in California on 6 June, and ended the primary season with 430,703 votes, 2.7% of the total. In June she became the first woman to take part in a United States presidential debate. At the convention, on 12 July, the roll call still gave her 152 first-ballot votes, fourth behind McGovern’s 1,728. Chisholm later said she had run “in spite of hopeless odds” to show a refusal to accept the status quo.

Several people around her have longer stories than the film can hold. Arthur Hardwick Jr., the role Terrence Howard plays, became Chisholm’s second husband in 1977, after her divorce from Conrad Chisholm, and remained so until his death in 1986. Conrad served as her bodyguard during the campaign until the Secret Service took over her protection in May 1972, after three confirmed threats against her life. And the George Wallace played by W. Earl Brown was the segregationist rival she visited in hospital after he was shot in May 1972, a visit that caused controversy at the time; years later, Wallace helped her win Southern votes for a bill extending the minimum wage to domestic workers.

A 15-year project for the King sisters

Shirley took a long time to reach the screen. Regina King and her sister Reina King spent around 15 years trying to tell Chisholm’s story. Regina King has said the project lay dormant for a while as their careers took off, and that their starting point was how many people had never heard Chisholm’s name. The decisive step came on the set of American Crime, John Ridley’s anthology series, which earned Regina King two of her four Emmys: she has recalled cornering Ridley between two trailers during a lunch break to ask him what he thought of Shirley Chisholm. Ridley wrote the script, and the three of them developed it together.

The film was officially announced in February 2021, produced by Participant and Royal Ties Productions, with Regina King, Reina King, Anikah McLaren, Elizabeth Haggard and Ridley as producers. In December 2021 the supporting cast was announced as the project moved to Netflix, and by 7 December shooting was under way in Cincinnati, although the story is set in Brooklyn, Washington, Miami and San Francisco. Participant, the company Jeffrey Skoll founded to finance films with a social purpose, announced on 16 April 2024 that it was ceasing operations after two decades, less than a month after Shirley reached Netflix, which makes it one of the company’s final releases.

Lance Reddick was the first and only actor Regina King approached for Mac Holder; she had already worked with him. Reddick, known for The Wire, Fringe, Bosch and the John Wick films, died suddenly on 17 March 2023, at 60, a year before Shirley was released, so this is one of the roles that reached audiences after his death, with Ballerina (2025) as his final film. King has also said that Lucas Hedges was the only actor they contacted for Robert Gottlieb, a choice she linked to the way Chisholm writes about Gottlieb in her own book, and that Ridley persuaded Reina King, who had not planned to act in the film, to play Muriel.

John Ridley and the crew

John Ridley won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, becoming the second African American to win in that category after Geoffrey S. Fletcher. He began as a stand-up comedian and a writer for 1990s sitcoms, directed his first feature, Cold Around the Heart, in 1997, and wrote the novel Stray Dogs, which Oliver Stone filmed as U Turn. As a director he went on to make Jimi: All Is by My Side (2013) and Needle in a Timestack (2021); on television he created American Crime and led Guerrilla and Five Days at Memorial, and in 2017 he directed the documentary Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992. Shirley is his fourth fiction feature as a director.

Regina King, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for If Beale Street Could Talk and made her feature directing debut with One Night in Miami (2020), is also one of the film’s producers. Behind the camera, Ridley worked with cinematographer Ramsey Nickell and editor JoAnne Yarrow. The score is by Tamar-kali, the composer of Dee Rees’s Mudbound, who by coincidence had already scored a different film called Shirley: Josephine Decker’s 2020 drama about the writer Shirley Jackson.

Chisholm on screen before Shirley

Chisholm had appeared on screen several times before this film. Shola Lynch’s documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed premiered at Sundance in 2004, aired on American public television in 2005 and later won a Peabody Award. Uzo Aduba played her in the 2020 miniseries Mrs. America and won an Emmy for it, and Wanda Sykes played her in Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part II in 2023. Another feature, The Fighting Shirley Chisholm, with Danai Gurira cast in November 2020, was still in development as of 2024. For many listeners, her name first arrived through a 1988 line by Biz Markie: “Reagan is the Pres, but I voted for Shirley Chisholm.”

Its run on Netflix

On Netflix, Shirley entered the global Top 10 for English-language films at number seven, with 3.6 million views in its first three days, in the week ending 24 March 2024. It climbed to number six the following week with 4.1 million views, according to Netflix’s own weekly Top 10, and spent two weeks on the list, at a time when Irish Wish and Damsel held the top places.

On paper, Shirley is a political biopic that chooses a defeat as its subject and builds it around the mechanics of a campaign: money, ballot access, airtime, delegates and promises that were not kept. That gives it a different shape from biographies that end in triumph, and it rests on a long list of real figures, from Barbara Lee to Huey P. Newton, played by Brad James. Whether that structure works as drama is for each viewer to judge; what the film does is put Chisholm’s 1972 run, and the small team that carried it, at the centre of the frame.

Tags: Netflix, biographies, entertainment, Regina King, Shirley Chisholm, racism