Advocacy, sure, but compelling

Reformed criminal stories are tricky, especially ones in which the “before” shot scares you, the “after” shot practically glows with beatitude and the back story requires more tissues than an overturned soda in a minivan console. The more compelling the narrative, the more engrossing the characters, the more uplifting the message -- the more queasy the feeling that you’re being taken for a ride gnaws on you later.

If there’s one unequivocal thing to be said, though, about “Redemption” -- an FX movie airing Sunday that stars Jamie Foxx as a former gang leader and death row inmate turned author, youth role model and multiple Nobel prize nominee -- it’s that it makes a case like a Samsonite. Thanks in large part to Foxx’s rock-solid performance, “Redemption” backs up its title with a passion.

Unquestionably it’s a piece of advocacy filmmaking -- Stan “Tookie” Williams, the real person on whom the film is based, could face execution as early as next year -- but it’s also a compelling and seductively convincing piece.

Those who object to the glorified portrayal of Williams may also find themselves objecting to the portrayal of those who object to the glorified portrayal of Williams. At the end of the film, a victims’ rights activist douses Williams’ friend and co-author Barbara Cottman Becnel (Lynn Whitfield) with blood. And, boy, does she tell him off.

In 1981, Williams, a co-founder of the Crips street gang in Los Angeles, was convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to death. During the first decade of his 23-year stint at San Quentin, Williams went largely unreformed, collecting rent from non-gang members, taxes from drug dealers and orchestrating gang wars. Six years in solitary confinement followed, and after a fellow inmate bequeathed him a dictionary, Williams began to devote his time to more scholarly pursuits.

With Becnel’s help and support (she’s a journalist who first interviewed Williams for a book she was writing on the origins of street gangs), Williams went on to write nine anti-gang books for children (a 10th book, a memoir, is in the works) and to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Directed by Vondie Curtis Hall (“Glitter,” yes, “Glitter”) and shot by David Greene (the late, great “Platinum”), “Redemption” suffers, on occasion, from a needless profusion of super neato visual effects. (It’s a pandemic movie problem, but still.) Strip searches, for instance, happen at warp speed. And simple cuts are sacrificed to make way for hurtling zooms and whiplash pans. At times, when cervical injury seems all but unavoidable, it’s enough to make one wish for the serenity of a car commercial, but luckily the film’s smoggy, sun-baked color palette and otherwise contemplative pacing make up for some of the too-cool-for-jail effect.

The film begins shortly after Williams enters prison, intercut with deliberations with what seems to be a Nobel Prize committee, and ends in February 2002, after a federal appeals court ruled against him. (Williams wants his case heard by the Supreme Court; the federal court rejected his appeal but recommended that his sentence be reduced to life in prison.)

Foxx pulls off a seamless and completely credible transformation from menacing street thug to soft-spoken, introspective writer and social advocate, although some of the hair-chronology (from gangster bald, to Rick James braids to socially conscious dreads) can get confusing. So is the fact that Williams starts to glow as if lighted from within.

Commendable as his work has been, making Williams into a martyr seems unfair to real martyrs. The film subconsciously underscores this, as he is visited at one point by Winnie “the wrong” Mandela, played by CCH Pounder.

Whitfield is lovable as Becnel, a journalist whose own sense of self was apparently transformed throughout her long friendship with Williams. The needlessly apologetic, somewhat uptight daughter of a schoolteacher and a dry-cleaner (as well as the divorced mother of a teenage son who found himself drawn at one time to gang life), Whitfield’s Becnel goes from a prim, pearls-wearing former public policy analyst into a passionate social-issues journalist and a developer of youth violence prevention programs.

In one particularly tender scene, Williams asks Becnel to put aside her book and help him get his to publishers. “I want to stop this madness that I created,” Williams says, and Foxx infuses the moment with the painful, shy hesitation of a formerly formidable figure trying something intimidating for the first time in years. The scenes showing Becnel in her bright, pretty kitchen, intimately chatting on the phone with a death row inmate to gain insight into her son and his scary phases could easily fall into maudlin territory, but Whitfield and Foxx’s touch is too light for that to happen.

From Williams’ theory that black-on-black gang violence was the natural offshoot of an endemic lack of self-esteem brought on by institutionalized racism (one of his first books was titled “Gangs and Self-Esteem”), to the evolution of L.A. street gangs, “Redemption” is a rudimentary primer on gang life and gang psychology.

The main focus is on the relationship between Williams and Becnel, but the awesome scope and destructive power of what he helped start -- the Crips, that is -- amazed even Williams. And reportedly his efforts to reverse his earlier project also have been fairly far-reaching.

Some critics of his books find them to be overly simplistic and somewhat condescending, which doesn’t much jibe with the scholarly, inmate-of-letters thing Foxx does so convincingly. In any event, Williams’ books may be flawed, but the story -- at least the way FX tells it -- is intriguing and inspiring nonetheless.

*

‘Redemption’

Where: FX

When: 8 to 10 p.m. Sunday

Rating: The network has rated the movie TV-14LV (may not be suitable for children younger than 14, with advisories for coarse language and violence.

Jamie Foxx...Stan “Tookie” Williams

Lynn Whitfield...Barbara Cottman Becnel

CCH Pounder...Winnie Mandela

Brenden Jefferson...Young Stan Williams

Lee Thompson Young...Charles Becnel

Executive producers Rudy Langlais, Van Spurgeon, Marcus King and Jon Katzman. Director Vondie Curtis Hall. Writer J.T. Allen.