There is a certain villainy about DuVernay's LBJ, as portrayed by Tom Wilkinson. With an unwieldy Texas accent, Wilkinson's LBJ berates King for insisting he press for a voting rights bill now, rather than defer it in favor of his top legislative priority, the War on Poverty. The angry, adversarial tone of their Oval Office meetings seems a bit implausible, and the film's implication that Johnson was complicit in J. Edgar Hoover's contemptible surveillance and vindictive smear campaign against King seems a bridge too far – even though LBJ was a notoriously crude man and is suspected of having done things far worse than opposing King. Hoover (played in the film by Dylan Baker) was a dangerous and powerful psychopath, and the film uses as a narrative device data from FBI surveillance of King's movements. Johnson and King did clash, but it was over the Vietnam War, after the events depicted in the film.
The film may be a bit unfair to Johnson, but DuVernay says that was not her intention. “I think this has all been a bit overblown, especially because this film is not about LBJ,” she told Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air." “This is a film that's about the people of Selma and the black leadership of Selma and the allies who came to the aid of black people who were being terrorized in Selma. And one of those allies turned out to be, eventually, LBJ," whose speech announcing the Voting Rights Act, in which he quotes "We Shall Overcome," crowns the film triumphantly.
