A noteworthy political life gets lost in its details in “Shirley,” a Netflix bio-pic about the first African American Congresswoman and first African American woman to run for president, Shirley Chisholm.

Veteran TV director (“Barbershop,””Guerilla”) and novelist John Ridley landed Oscar-winner Regina King for the title role, gave the great Lance Reddick (“John Wick”) a fine farewell role as Congresswoman/candidate Chisholm’s chief adviser, and had Terrence Howard and Lucas Hedges to work with.

But the lumbering script, taking Chisholm to her first days in Congress and then through the ordeal of that 1972 Democratic primary campaign, skips over or barely mentions much that was notable about those events and loses itself in internal debates and dramatically-flat meetings that were never quite confrontations, meetings with figures mostly forgortten now, save for Chisholm.

It’s a clumsily-condensed account of Chisholm’s life and career. And King, while managing some of the “Brooklyn school teacher’s” soaring rhetoric and accent, comes nowhere near imitating the Congresswoman’s distinct voice.

With Nixon in the White House, the Vietnam War raging and Civil Rights getting pushed into the background, Chisholm turns from her attention-grabbing 1968 election to the House of Representatives where her fight against a Speaker who assigned the Brooklynite to the House Agriculture Committee showed her resolve, to bringing an activist message to the 1972 presidential campaign.

“Don’t ever accept things as they are,” she tells a protege (Christina Jackson) and reminds an earlier intern (Hedges) whom she puts in charge of young-voter recruitment. The right to vote had been extended to 18 year olds just before the ’72 campaign. She’d have to weigh whether to pursue or accept an endorsement from so-called “radical” groups that were politically-active back then, the Black Panthers included.

But for all the film’s details about the “back room deals” of that fraught contest, the personalities involved (George Wallace, Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern among them) and the violence visited on it — Wallace was shot — “Shirley” never really grasps the woman’s idealism, her resolve and why a movie about this ground-breaking moment that barely moved the political needle is really necessary.

Reddick stands out in the supporting cast, with Hedges, Howard, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Michael Cherrie as her almost-anonymous, in-the-background husband Conrad, also registering.

Which is pretty hard to do as there was simply too much going on in that momentous year to get it all in or do justice to much of anything. Watergate, Vietnam, the rise of environmentalism, Muskie’s right-wing triggered meltdown, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, rising Latin voter activism and the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement competed for Chisholm’s attention, the nation’s and this movie’s.

King handles the flashy moments — a big speech or two, a firm stand on principle or three. But there’s just not enough here, and too much at the same time, for “Shirley” to come off.

Rating: PG-13, Brief Violence|Some Smoking|Racial Slurs, profanity

Cast: Regina King, Lance Reddick, Terrence Howard, Lucas Hudges, Michael Cherrie,
Brian Stokes Mitchell and Christina Jackson

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Ridley. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58