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Although he occasionally uses a broad brush dipped in primary colors while fashioning his admiring portrait of Bob Zellner, the grandson of a Ku Klux Klansman who improbably evolved into a civil rights activist during the early 1960s, filmmaker Barry Alexander Brown shrewdly and intelligently avoids most of the “white savior” clichés common to such scenarios in “Son of the South.” Based on Zellner’s memoir “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement,” and available starting Feb. 5 in limited theatrical runs and on digital platforms, Brown’s well-crafted and period-persuasive biopic strikes a dramatically sound and emotionally satisfying balance between the moral awakening of its white protagonist and his relationships with sometimes encouraging, sometimes skeptical Black leaders and foot soldiers.

The movie’s opening minutes indicate just how dangerous it could be for a white Southerner to be viewed as a “race traitor” in the days of segregation,...