129 mins |
Rated
R (for language throughout, some violence, bloody images and drug use.)
Directed by Aaron Sorkin
Starring John Carroll Lynch, Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eddie Redmayne, Mark Rylance, Thomas Middleditch, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Alex Sharp, Noah Robbins, Danny Flaherty, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, Sacha Baron Cohen
It’s a curious thing that in the movie culture of the last 50 years, you can count on one hand (or maybe one middle finger) the good dramas that have been made about the political counterculture of the 1960s. The turbulence of that era has never stopped casting a shadow over our own.
Yet Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today. Sorkin doesn’t just re-stage the infamous trial, in which a motley crew of anti-war leaders were charged with plotting to stir up violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He jumps into the trial, goes outside the trial, cuts back to the demonstrations, and leads us into the combustible clash of personalities that was going on behind the scenes — the way, for instance, that the Yippie ringleader Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), with his viper’s grin and showbiz-ready revolution-for-the-hell-of-it bravura, and Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), the buttoned-down, furrowed-brow cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), neither like nor trust one another, in part because they have a deep rift: Do you work to change the system from within, or jolt the system with shock therapy?
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It’s a curious thing that in the movie culture of the last 50 years, you can count on one hand (or maybe one middle finger) the good dramas that have been made about the political counterculture of the 1960s. The turbulence of that era has never stopped casting a shadow over our own.
Yet Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today. Sorkin doesn’t just re-stage the infamous trial, in which a motley crew of anti-war leaders were charged with plotting to stir up violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He jumps into the trial, goes outside the trial, cuts back to the demonstrations, and leads us into the combustible clash of personalities that was going on behind the scenes — the way, for instance, that the Yippie ringleader Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), with his viper’s grin and showbiz-ready revolution-for-the-hell-of-it bravura, and Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), the buttoned-down, furrowed-brow cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), neither like nor trust one another, in part because they have a deep rift: Do you work to change the system from within, or jolt the system with shock therapy?