The BBFC description says “strong language, use of performance enhancing drugs” – a description that could apply both to the film and its real-life subject. Ben Foster is scarily convincing as Lance Armstrong, the cancer survivor who became a record-breaking Tour de France winner thanks to a unique blend of charismatic determination and biochemical enhancement. Like Stephen Frears’s award-winning Philomena, this casts a comedian in a straight role as the journalist who leads us through the story, and upon whose writings the script is based. Chris O’Dowd is Sunday Times reporter David Walsh, whose exposé of Armstrong’s systematic doping provoked an aggressive lawsuit. Seasoned pros Frears and screenwriter John Hodge handle the sharp corners of the story with aplomb, although there’s little here that wasn’t covered in Alex Gibney’s superior 2013 documentary The Armstrong Lie. As with Robert Zemeckis’s current release The Walk (which follows in the footsteps of James Marsh’s Man on Wire), the documentary is arguably both more dramatic and more truthful, although Zemeckis’s film does feature an existence-justifying wire-walking set piece. There’s nothing to match that here, cinematographer Danny Cohen’s urgent bike footage playing second fiddle to the behind-the-scenes action in the hospital rooms, training centres, and mobile blood transfusion units where the dirty deeds were done.
