Any blue-chip drama tossed ungilded into the post-awards dead zone risks seeming like the Academy’s cast-offs, but this one’s worth salvaging: an intelligent, rigorously constructed biopic of reporter Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), whose mid-90s dispatches exposed links between the CIA, South Central LA drug dealers and the Nicaraguan Contras. That career-defining scoop lands halfway through Michael Cuesta’s film, the better to observe the contents of the ensuing media shitstorm settle about its subject’s shoulders: Renner’s unflashy, sympathetic character work makes Webb several degrees more vulnerable than the crusading-journo archetype usually permits. Fresh from TV’s Homeland, Cuesta sustains a quietly compelling paranoia as the powers-that-be start blurring the narrative line, while his wily performers – Oliver Platt and Richard Schiff as rival editors, Michael Sheen as a Beltway insider – lend unusual contours to Webb’s notes and transcripts. Not since 2003’s Shattered Glass has the journalistic pursuit of truth been presented on screen as such a mortally serious matter of honour.
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