Never having read Malcolm X’s biography, nor being overly familiar with his early life, it’d still be easy to realize Spike Lee was necessitated to edit out significant portions of the man’s real life narrative. The movie was still three hours long.

It’d be impossible to completely portray any single person’s life over the course of a film. Even with Malcolm X’s being truncated by his 1965 assassination, Lee left out some good bits. But that’s the crux of film making: creating a palatable product while still including every necessary element to tell a story.

At such an incredible run time, Malcolm X is perhaps best taken in over a few viewings. There’re enough transitional moments as to almost have the practice be favored over a straight run through. But with Lee working from a script James Baldwin and Arnold Perl, completed in the sixties, there should have been more to keep viewers riveted.

The danger in making a film with the expansive grandeur inherent in telling a man’s tale, and especially a man like Malcolm, is that whatever the point to the whole thing is, it can’t come off as preachy or the film’s doomed. And while Lee’s effort here doesn’t dissolve quite into that, there are huge stretches of the movie that serve no purpose other than to elucidate the minutiae of Malcolm’s transformations, plural – an understandable route, but an unnecessary one.

Lee obviously felt Malcolm X was ripe for use as a manner of instructing youth, he even advised kids to skip school to go and see the film. But if that was a part of his intended demographic, a better edit of the film could have been contrived.

All directors – or even all artists – suffer, to some extent, from a complex regarding self importance. Perhaps the length of Lee’s films are ample evidence. But he also seems to appear, in some capacity, be a part of the cast as well. Never has his performance been distracting – and even in a few cases, Crooklyn specifically, it’s been an important component of the final work.

Included here as Malcolm’s buddy – the second time Lee and Denzel Washington are paired as such – Lee takes only scant time on screen. But its in these early years that the Malcolm character becomes fleshed out as a human being as opposed to the icon that we’ve all come to know him as.