With a fresh Supreme Court term and an ex-president’s fraud trial underway, it seems worth noting that we are living through an unexpectedly rich moment for courtroom dramas on-screen as well as off.

Those seeking more traditionally rousing courtroom entertainment will certainly find it in Maggie Betts’ bursting and big-hearted new movie, “The Burial.” Adapted by Betts and Doug Wright from a richly reported 1999 New Yorker piece by Jonathan Harr, it tells the story of Jeremiah “Jerry” O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), a small-town Mississippi funeral home owner who in 1995 sued the Canadian billionaire Ray Loewen (Bill Camp) over a contract dispute that swiftly snowballed into something more.

At first glance, you couldn’t ask for a more obviously crowd-pleasing setup: an honest plaintiff and a hissable defendant, their pitched legal battle set to the creakily satisfying music of pounded gavels, overruled objections and full-throated lawyerly speechifying.

But Betts, whose first feature was the absorbing monastic drama “Novitiate,” has a gift for subverting and fulfilling expectations at once, and also for turning the strictures of traditional establishments inside out. Jerry and Ray may have been a veritable David and Goliath of the death-care industry, but this David’s lethal sling took the outsized form of Willie Gary, a flamboyant personal injury attorney with little contract law experience but an impressive track record of bodying the competition.

And it’s Willie, played with extraordinary gusto and exquisite control by Jamie Foxx, who refuses to settle or compromise on his client’s behalf, in the process forcing all parties involved — the audience very much included — to see the enormous moral stakes and raw human interest in an ostensibly unremarkable case.

Foxx’s Willie is a controlled force of nature. It’s no coincidence that when we first see him, sporting a Rolex, gold-rimmed specs and a perfectly color-coded suit-and-tie ensemble, he’s standing up to speak in church, even if his proper sanctuary is a court of civil law.

Like any religious huckster, though perhaps a shade more honest, Willie is a master of emotional manipulation and rhetorical force. He knows how to tell a story, how to build sympathy and draw out tension for maximum impact before going in for the kill. Locking eyes with a captive jury, he preaches a gospel of prosperity and punitive damages, insisting that they vindicate his aggrieved clients with multimillion-dollar payouts. More often than not, they do as they’re told.

The Jerry-Willie alliance is set in motion by a younger attorney (an excellent Mamoudou Athie) who rightly observes that, with the case being tried in a majority-Black town, Willie might be just the secret weapon they need. If that sounds like a cynical ploy at first, an attempt to drag race into the spotlight, the movie’s persuasive rejoinder is that race is never irrelevant, especially where matters of corporate malfeasance, jury selection and the South are concerned.

The racial dynamics at play are hardly incidental, and “The Burial,” suffice to say, turns out to be about much more than just a contract dispute. As the case progresses, an entire history of corporate racism, classism and predatory capitalism comes to light — a history that, for all its ‘90s datedness (a chunky cellphone here, a cruddy VHS tape there), could hardly feel timelier or more topical.

Even so, for a story whose every beat, every cross-examination and every smoking gun lands more or less where you’d expect, “The Burial” is remarkable in the way it gradually excavates its central idea: the difficulty of Black solidarity and progress in a society that insists on exploiting Black pain for profit.

That’s a dryly academic way of putting something that Willie, with his enviable oratorical powers, transforms into the stuff of excoriating comedy and high drama. Even the camera, which generally serves the story in as fluid and unshowy a way as possible, can’t help but be magnetized by the sheer dynamism of Foxx’s screen presence. His Willie doesn’t just vanquish the competition; he buries it.