A shameful chapter in American history exposed in Loving

I know Loving had received great reviews but I feared it would be too schmaltzy, too self-righteous, and perhaps too violent, but in fact I was wrong and found the movie - none of whose lead players were familiar to me at all - to be engaging, well-paced, moving, and informative. The writer-director (looking this up), Jeff Nichols, balances all the elements well: developing the relationship of the two lead characters - Richard Loving, a Southern working-class white man from impoverished rural Virginia, and his wife, Mildred, a Southern working-class black woman. He creates a palpable sense of their constant state of danger once the marry and he also creates strong, nuanced, and complex relationships among the Lovings and their two families - some real family bonds and warmth, some cross-racial acceptance, but also significant anger, resentment (and the torment they are putting the family through), jealousy (why would Richard forsake his white privilege, one of the black men wonders in powerful scene late in the film). The Lovings are exiled from Virginia, where inter-racial marriages were illegal - in 1958!, this is not a Civil War drama! - and move to D.C., but they want to be able to return and settle near their families, and here's where the movie enters the public sphere, as the ACLU takes up their cause in brings the matter up to the Supreme Court. Mildred throughout is more comfortable with challenging the system and with the attendant media obligations; Richard, more stolid and conservative in many ways, just wants to be left alone. They are not crusaders and political advocates - just a family (3 kids, eventually), ordinary and typical in most ways, brought unwillingly into the spotlight and brave enough to stand their ground. Without histrionics, the film exposes a shameful chapter in American history, and does so through dramatization and character development rather than through polemics. Could earn Oscar nods for the leads (Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton) and for Nichols.