JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH sticks close to the truth, as opposed to THE CHICAGO 7 with its many distortions of the reality it professes to portray. Both stories are so inherently dramatic they need few, if any, fictional changes, especially the melodrama Sorkin's fictional additions brought to the latter (having the consistently pacifist Dellinger act violently in court, which never happened, or ignoring the real women who were integral to the Chicago 7 story while showcasing a nonexistent relationship of Jerry Rubin with a fictional character, etc.).
If I have a caveat with JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH, it's casting Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton, I met Fred Hampton and saw him speak to crowds, and the two dominant aspects of his physical presence were his size (he seemed bigger than he probably actually was) offset by his deep dimples (mentioned in the poem read to him by Dominique Fishback's character). Thus he seemed powerful and childlike at the same time, a very compelling mixture missing, for me, in Kalluya's performance.
I suppose another caveat is that Kaluuya is older (Hampton was 20) and a British actor, which doesn't disqualify him (LaKeith Stanfield is a lot older than the character he plays, who was a teenager in reality, which if performed by a teen would have made the FBI agent an even more appalling manipulator), but left me a little disappointed because as good as the movie is—especially the performances by Kaluuya, Stanfied, and Fishback—I think that it could have been better.
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