‘Loudmouth’ Review: A Portrait of the Reverend Al Sharpton Captures His Activism, His Notoriety, and the Dance Between the Two

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor a long time, if you said the name “the Reverend Al Sharpton,” you were guaranteed to get a response that seemed to erupt from the very gut fauna of mass-media outrage. “Loudmouth,” the fascinating new documentary about Sharpton, makes a convincing case that most of that moral high dudgeon was fatally overblown.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Sharpton was at the molten center of every race-based news event in the greater New York area. Some would say, quite reasonably, that this made him a devoted activist. (No one ever pilloried the Rev.

Martin Luther King Jr. for showing up too much.) At rallies, at protest marches, on the courthouse steps, Sharpton spoke with a prickly ferocity and power, giving voice to those who didn’t have it.

Was he a new version of King or Gandhi? Of course not. And he didn’t need to be. He was his own creation — the Civil Rights agitator in a track suit who bridged the activist idealism of the ’60s with something ruder, more brazen, and (in hindsight) completely necessary: the showboat tactics of the contemporary media age.