Fishburne inhabits the role so thoroughly and convincingly that you really think it's Marshall up there on the simple, brightly-lit set devised by Allen Moyer (table, lectern and chairs, backed up by a rear-projection screen). Clad in an off-the-rack blue suit, Fishburne takes us back over Marshall's illustrious career, commencing with the justice's appearance at Howard University Law School late in life and working backwards from there as he sheds his cane and recalls what it was like growing up in the Jim Crow south.

Marshall was a battler, a warrior who fought for civil rights and democracy from the time he graduated from law school and eventually made it to the Supreme Court. He spent decades working for the NAACP, using "the weapon of the law" (his favorite expression) to try and overturn segregation, racism and inequality in the courts. A self-professed and proud liberal, he also came down strongly while on the bench against capital punishment and First Amendment restrictions.

Thurgood doesn't neglect Marshall's personal life; there are quick but telling sketches of his two wives, his mentor at law school (Charles Hamilton Houston), his legal adversary in the famed Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation case (John Clay Davis), Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Lyndon B. Johnson (who bravely, in defiance of the south, appointed him to the bench).

Stevens also touches lightly on Marshall's drinking and womanizing; equally so on his contentious relationship with Martin Luther King. 

If Thurgood sometimes suffers from a lack of depth and complexity, it more than makes up for it with its forthright defense of democratic, liberal values -- especially when Fishburne dramatizes them so vividly and memorably.