CHADWICK BOSEMAN broke into movies in 2013, at the age of 35. He was gone only seven years later, at 43. When he died, we all began to tout the majestic array of names among his achievements: Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall. Most important, though, is the fictional but — thanks to Boseman — very much living and lived-in T’Challa, king of Wakanda. In the midst of a moment as ideologically fractured as ours, the Black Panther hero is an unlikely unifier in a world beset with chaos. Boseman’s was a strange, wondrous, meteoric career snuffed out; a career that reads, in retrospect, like a political project, an attitude toward history and how we tell it.
Boseman’s approach to performance upended the usual rituals of actorly impersonation. His…
