These 1960s seven are just magnificent
‘O15 ★★★★✩
SCAR me! Oscar me!’ shrieks this incredibly timely liberal drama from writer/director Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The West Wing), which boasts the kind of all-star cast rarely seen outside of an Agatha Christie whodunit.
It’s a handsome, well-tooled retelling of the anti-Vietnam protests that disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention. A year later, a vindictive, Trumplike US attorney general (John Doman) instructs a keen young lawyer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to prosecute seven – in fact, eight – men from the so-called ‘radical left’ with conspiracy to cross state lines in order to incite riot. These include an earnest, neatly brushed student leader (Eddie Redmayne), a couple of wild-haired, permanently stoned ‘Yippies’ (Sacha Baron Cohen and Succession star Jeremy Strong) and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (a grave and forceful Yahya AbdulMateen II). As one of the sidelined seven comments: ‘This is the Academy Awards of protests and as far as I’m concerned, it’s an honour just to be nominated.’
Such are the zingers you’d expect of a Sorkin script. Although his signature walk-and-talk style is curtailed by the courtroom setting, the storyline still zips between trial and protests, pepped along by a characteristically rich and actionpacked Daniel Pemberton score.
It’s a moment of shocked silence, however, that lands the most impact. As the elderly judge (Oscarnominated Frank Langella) orders that a defiant Seale be dragged from the stand, and ‘dealt with as he should be dealt with’, Seale returns, beaten, bound and gagged by the white marshals.
‘Can you breathe alright, Bobby?’ Mark Rylance’s lawyer asks. It’s a throwaway line amplified by the ‘I can’t breathe’ rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter protests. Sorkin may have been working on this period film for 15 years but its dissection of US social injustice could not feel more relevant.
Out now in selected cinemas and on Netflix from October 16