Devotion vs. History: How Accurate Is the Jesse Brown Korean War Film?

Jesse Brown's story should be more famous than it is. He was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1926, the son of a sharecropper, grew up determined to fly, and became the first Black man to complete the United States Navy's flight training program and earn his wings. Two years after receiving his commission, he was shot down over North Korea. His wingman, Tom Hudner, did something that almost no military pilot has ever voluntarily done: he crashed his own aircraft on a frozen enemy mountainside to try to pull his friend out of the burning wreck.

Hudner could not save him. Brown died on that mountain. Hudner received the Medal of Honor. The story sat largely unremembered until writer Adam Makos spent years tracking down surviving witnesses and produced the 2015 book that became the 2022 film directed by J.D. Dillard, with Jonathan Majors playing Brown and Glen Powell as Hudner.

The film is a serious, respectful piece of work. It is also, like most serious biopics, a mix of documented history and necessary dramatization.

What Hollywood Got RIGHT

Jesse Brown's pioneering status

The film is scrupulous about the weight of Brown's position. When Brown entered Navy flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in 1947, the Navy had been racially integrated only on paper since 1946, and the institutional resistance was grinding and real. The film depicts this through small sustained moments rather than dramatic speeches: the cold reception in the ready room, the informal social exclusions, the double standard of scrutiny applied to Brown that did not apply to his white peers. This matches what historians and surviving contemporaries have described.

Brown did earn his wings in 1948, making him the first Black naval aviator. He was assigned to Fighter Squadron 32 (VF-32) and flew the Vought F4U Corsair. His situation was genuinely novel and his treatment genuinely hostile in ways the film does not exaggerate.

The Chosin rescue attempt

The central event of the film, Hudner's crash-landing to reach Brown, is depicted with substantial accuracy. On December 4, 1950, VF-32 was providing close air support during the desperate American withdrawal from the Chosin Reservoir, one of the bloodiest engagements of the Korean War. Brown's Corsair was hit by ground fire, and he belly-landed on a mountainside near Somong-ni in North Korea.

Hudner circled overhead, saw that Brown was alive but trapped, and made the decision to go down. He notched his landing gear up, slowed his aircraft, and deliberately crash-landed on the same frozen slope. He ran to Brown's cockpit and found him pinned by the crumpled fuselage. He packed snow into the engine to prevent a worse fire and tried to free Brown's legs. A helicopter with rescue equipment arrived later, but by then Brown had died from a combination of his injuries and exposure to the sub-zero cold.

The film's depiction of these events is faithful. The dialogue is invented but the sequence of actions is accurate.

Hudner's Medal of Honor

President Harry Truman awarded Tom Hudner the Medal of Honor in April 1951. The citation specifically noted Hudner's voluntary crash-landing and his efforts to free Brown. It was, as the film implies, an unusual award: most Medal of Honor recipients are cited for offensive action against enemy forces. Hudner's medal was for a rescue attempt on behalf of a fellow American. The scene in which Hudner receives the medal, and the complicated emotions he carried about it for the rest of his long life, reflects what Hudner himself said in interviews.

The segregation-era Navy

The film's texture of institutional racism is accurate in detail. Brown did have to fight to find housing near the base because white landlords refused Black tenants. He did face social exclusion in officers' clubs. His wife Daisy, depicted in the film, was real. The friendship between Brown and Hudner is not manufactured by the script. Multiple VF-32 veterans told Makos and later interviewers that the two men genuinely liked each other in a way that cut across the pressures of the era.

The Corsair

The aircraft is accurately depicted. The F4U Corsair was the primary carrier-borne fighter-bomber the Navy flew in Korea, recognizable by its distinctive gull-wing design. The squadron's nose-art, tactics, and operational setting on USS Leyte are correctly rendered.

What Hollywood Got WRONG

The Cannes sequence is substantially dramatized

The most talked-about scene in Devotion involves the squadron's brief layover in Cannes on their way to the Korean theater, and a chance encounter with Elizabeth Taylor at a party. Makos's book describes a real meeting between Brown, Hudner, and Taylor during this stopover. The film extends the sequence significantly, giving it greater weight and more developed dialogue than the historical record supports.

Taylor herself could not have confirmed the account, as she died in 2011. The meeting appears to have occurred, but the specific details, particularly the private conversation between Taylor and Brown in the film, are invented for dramatic purposes. The scene works emotionally but should be understood as Hollywood compression rather than documented history.

Some timeline compression

The film condenses the year of 1950 into a cleaner narrative arc than the actual sequence of events. Brown and Hudner had been flying combat missions for months before Chosin, and the gradual development of their friendship and Brown's difficulties on the base happened over a longer, more uneven period than the film implies. This is a standard biopic technique and does not distort the essential history.

Jesse Brown's complexity is softened

Brown was not simply a noble martyr. He was ambitious, proud, driven by competitive instincts, and by some accounts difficult to get close to precisely because he could not afford to show vulnerability in a hostile environment. The film makes him more openly expressive of his inner life than Brown appears to have been in reality. Hudner's later interviews describe a friend who processed most of his struggles internally and rarely disclosed them even to people he trusted.

This softening is understandable in a film that wants viewers to connect with Brown emotionally, but it tips his characterization slightly toward sainthood when the historical Brown was a more complicated figure.

Hudner's later life goes unmentioned

The film ends on the Medal of Honor ceremony and does not address what came afterward. In 2013, Hudner returned to North Korea to try to locate Brown's remains, which were never recovered from the 1950 crash site. The North Korean government allowed the visit but the search was unsuccessful. Hudner died in 2017 at age 93. His decades-long effort to recover his friend's remains is one of the most sustained acts of loyalty in modern American military history, and the film's omission of it, though understandable given its time frame, leaves out a significant part of what made the relationship matter.

Historical accuracy score: 7/10

Devotion is one of the more conscientious military biopics of recent years. It does not invent villains, does not fabricate major combat sequences, and resists the temptation to over-simplify Brown's historical significance into a single triumphant moment. The central rescue sequence, the Medal of Honor, and the institutional portrait of the segregated Navy are all grounded in real events.

What keeps it from a higher score is the Cannes dramatization, which invents specifics the historical record cannot support, and a general tendency to smooth the rougher edges of both Brown's and Hudner's personalities. These are sins of emphasis rather than invention. The core of the story, two men who formed an unlikely friendship in a segregated institution and whose bond was tested on a frozen Korean mountainside, is exactly what happened. The film is worth watching alongside a copy of Adam Makos's book, which covers the same terrain in more detail and with stronger documentation.