It’s impossible not to get caught up in this ripping courtroom drama that watchably restages an episode early in the career of the legendary civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, a decade before he worked on landmark segregation cases in the deep south. It’s 1941 and Marshall (Chadwick Boseman) is a hotshot young NAACP attorney, who, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, is defending a black man accused of rape by a white woman.

As legal drama, this is fairly conventional, stuffed to the brim with stirring speeches and a-ha! moments of cross examination theatrics. Sometimes, it feels a bit glib in its focus on the bromance between Thurman and the local white lawyer (Josh Gad) he hires to work with him, though Downton’s Dan Stevens is nicely cast as the nasty golden-boy prosecutor who becomes increasingly peevish as the trial wears on.

But this is Boseman’s film. A natural star, he’s already played two towering real-life figures – James Brown (Get on Up) and Jackie Robinson (42). He makes it a hat-trick here, totally convincing as an energetic young man, blessed with fierce idealism and swaggering charisma.