Packed house last night at the AMC Lincoln Center Theater for the NY Times Film Club premiere, a crowd of old white presumably liberal folk with a noticeably Jewish vibe. What you'd expect from the Times Film Club, I suppose, but the absence of black faces was very strange, and put the whole experience out of kilter for me. The film seems aimed at a much younger and blacker audience. When, at the beginning of the film, Boseman offhandedly ordered Gad to carry his bags, and Gad complied immediately, the lone outburst of "Whoa!" fell into almost total (shocked?) silence. That set the tone for me. Marshall is flat-out superhero here, the master bringing sidekick Friedman rapidly up to speed on the state of the Real World. That Waking Up Friedman subplot runs in and out of the main courtroom rape drama, where Sterling K Brown and Kate Hudson nearly steal the show with their far more realistic turns as Spell and Strubing, and James Cromwell and Dan Stevens are skin-crawlingly detestable as judge and prosecutor stooping ever lower to defend the racist ivory tower of Bridgeport CT. How this will do immediately at the box office depends on a lot of other factors, including the trailers. But my guess is that the inherent value of the story, which couldn't be more timely, will connect with audiences on a deep level, while the shenanigans on the surface keep them entertained, and the in the end they'll put it together in their own way. I expect this will be a keeper, something that will be on TV and video for a long, long time, and that "Marshall" will enter the rap lexicon on several levels very quickly.