Written and directed by Gary Ross, the film stars Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali, and Keri Russell.
[2] Newton Knight, a combat medic in the Confederate Army, deserts after learning of the Twenty Negro Law and witnessing the death of his nephew Daniel during the Second Battle of Corinth.
Abolitionist-oriented Aunt Sally, a sympathetic community leader, has her servant George take him into the swamps, where he is put under the protection of runaway slave Moses Washington and his followers and is nursed back to health.
When they begin ambushing military convoys to take back their property, Barbour and his commanding officer, Colonel Hood, order their farms to be torched.
After Moses is lynched while registering freedmen to vote, Newton is seen participating in a march of voters to the polls while they sing "John Brown's Body".
He is sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to leave the state, but his conviction is reversed by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1949, rather than risk the law being declared unconstitutional in light of the emerging civil rights movement.
[2] The film was released in the United States and Canada on June 24, 2016, alongside Independence Day: Resurgence and The Shallows and was projected to gross around $10 million in its opening weekend from 2,815 theaters.
The website's critical consensus reads, "Free State of Jones has the noblest of intentions, but they aren't enough to make up for its stilted treatment of a fascinating real-life story.
[26][27] Film critic Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post said, "[Director] Ross has insisted that he didn't want Free State of Jones to become another white savior movie, but that's precisely what it is, especially during scenes when the murderous injustice of slavery is refracted through Knight’s frustrated tears."
[28] The Atlantic's Vann R. Newkirk II said, "To say that McConaughey's portrayal of Newton Knight is a white savior perhaps undersells the trope... A better film would have muddled the clean white-savior narrative with an actual exploration of what the racial politics of a mixed-race insurgency in the South might have been like.
Reviewer A. O. Scott called it "a neglected and fascinating chapter in American history" and said it used "the tools of Hollywood spectacle to restore a measure of clarity to our understanding of the war and its aftermath.
"[31] The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody gave it a positive review, saying, "It's tempting to shunt Free State of Jones into the familiar genre of the white-savior tale, but Newton Knight appears as something else—not so much as a savior but as an avatar of a new South.
By seeing his own interests clearly and considering the economic and social structure of his locale and his nation insightfully, he's able to transcend heritage and history and to forge a community, both during and after the war, that will be fair, inclusive, and—yes—post-racial.