On the Basis of Sex

This sincere, well-acted biopic benefits from Jones' and Hammer's performances, but it's not as informative or extraordinary as the documentary RBG. The first part of the film, at Harvard, feels slightly unnecessary other than the fact that it lets the filmmakers showcase Jones going toe to toe with the likes of Sam Waterston and Stephen Root, who play a dean and a professor who underestimate the women the law school has deigned to admit. This slowest third of the movie also establishes what a dream of a husband Marty is to Ruth. It's clear, from their earliest scenes together, that the Ginsburgs have a remarkable marriage.

Director Mimi Leder, working from a script by Daniel Stiepleman (Ginsburg's nephew), picks up the pace in the second act once it's 1970 and the Ginsburgs start working on the case (Charles E. Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue) that puts her on the map as not only a law professor but an activist attorney. The character dynamics also ramp up because, by then, the Ginsburgs' oldest child, Jane (Cailee Spaeny), is an adolescent with her own feminist ideas, and the always entertaining Justin Theroux joins the proceedings as RBG's former camp friend/legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Mel Wulf. On the Basis of Sex does a fine job capturing the early legal career of a feminist, legal, and cultural icon, but consider it a complement to -- not a substitute for -- documentaries and books about the legendary jurist.