130 min | R | September 25, 2020 | Netflix
Seven men go on trial for crossing state lines to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The government wants a conviction. Aaron Sorkin wants a standing ovation, and he engineers one whether the history earns it or not.
It is 1969 and seven men sit in a federal courtroom in Chicago. The charge is conspiracy to cross state lines and incite the riots that erupted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The defendants come from different movements and want different things. Some seek revolution. Some seek an end to the war and a seat at the table. The film treats the trial as a proxy battle between the state and the right to protest it, and it argues that the prosecution exists to punish ideas rather than acts.
Sacha Baron Cohen plays Abbie Hoffman as a performer who understands the trial is theater and refuses to pretend otherwise. He delivers his lines like a comedian working a hostile room. Eddie Redmayne plays Tom Hayden as the cautious institutionalist who still believes in the system that is grinding him down. The friction between Hoffman and Hayden carries the film. Mark Rylance plays defense attorney William Kunstler with weary precision and a temper that surfaces only when the court abandons all pretense of fairness. Frank Langella plays Judge Julius Hoffman as a petty man who mistakes contempt for authority, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Bobby Seale as the one defendant the system refuses to even pretend to hear.
Aaron Sorkin directs his own screenplay and stages most of it as a series of verbal duels. The script does what Sorkin scripts do. It moves fast, lands its arguments in clean rhetorical beats, and gives every character a speech. The editing cross-cuts between the sterile courtroom and the chaos in the streets, using witness testimony to trigger the flashbacks so the past arrives as contested memory rather than settled fact. That structure is the smartest choice in the film. The staging is plainer, and long stretches play like a filmed debate where the camera simply finds whoever is talking.
Sorkin believes in the courtroom as a stage for moral clarity, and that faith is both the engine and the limit of the film. The dialogue crackles and the ensemble runs deep, but the mess of 1968 gets sanded into a story about decent men finding the right words at the right moment. The real trial was uglier and far less resolved than this. The film wants you on your feet at the end, and it builds toward that moment with great skill. It is a well-made machine for producing a feeling, and the feeling is real even when the history is too clean.