Directing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

By all accounts, Roy Cohn was the Crown Prince of Creeps. This was the man not only forever notorious as Chief Council to Joseph McCarthy at the height of anti-Communist fervor in the fifties, but he was instrumental in procuring the unjustified death penalty for Ethel Rosenberg, who was convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union in 1951. Cohn also made Donald Trump is protégé.

This was a man who, when confronted with the evidence that Ethel Rosenberg had been innocent, doubled down and stated that if he could, he would have pulled the electric chair lever himself. Where else could Donald Trump have learned to double down on his “conviction” that the Exonerated 5—formerly known as the Central Park 5—still deserved to be imprisoned, even after they were proved innocent?

Where’s My Roy Cohn?, the new documentary about the sinister lawyer, doesn’t get into that specific case, but it doesn’t need to. A fair amount of Cohn’s relationship with Trump gets focus, and the subtext is clear: if Donald Trump is an unrepentant piece of shit, Roy Cohn is the asshole who shat him out.

Much of Cohn’s story won’t be anything new to anyone old enough to remember when he was still alive; he lived to the age of 59, dying of AIDS in 1986. Until this film, though, the majority of my exposure to him as a historical figure was Al Pacino’s depiction of him in the 2003 HBO miniseries adaptation of the Tony Kushner play Angels in America. Meryl Streep played the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, tormenting Cohn on his death bed. That story focuses broadly on queer issues in America at the height of the AIDS crisis, with Roy Cohn as one of many narrative threads. (It holds up, incidentally: seek if out.)

For those of us who had barely reached the age of ten by the time Roy Cohn died, Where’s My Roy Cohn? is illuminating in a multitude of ways. Who knew Barbara Walters was one of the 37 character witnesses—alongside Donald Trump himself—to defend Cohn at his disbarment hearing? Suddenly my respect for Walters has plummeted. So he did her family a couple of favors, and that earns this transparently despicable man her enduring loyalty?

There are moments when this film skirts with hyperbole, as it pertains to Cohn’s influence on virtually all of modern American history, including the fates of two of America’s worst presidents. The other one would be Ronald Reagan, the man who turned a blind eye to AIDS for many years, and still lent Cohn the favor of special treatment, getting him access to experimental drugs he would never have gotten otherwise. Roy Cohn was his entire life, and to the end, a pathological liar about both his sexuality and his HIV status, never once admitting to either, in spite of both being widely known and the subject of multiple lines of questioning in interviews.

There is one particularly questionable choice on the part of the director, Matt Tyrnauer. One of the interview subjects, one of several cousins interviewed (an only child, Cohn had no siblings), recalls asking Roy of his nearly daily rotation of male sexual partners if he’s “the boy or the girl,” and apparently Roy replied, “I’m the girl.” And this begs the question: who gives a shit? Anyone who thinks it has any relevance whatsoever is victim to ignorant, regressive thinking, and its inclusion here is reckless at worst and clueless at best.

It’s also the only glaring misstep in the telling of Roy Cohn’s story here, a distant second being a slight tendency to traffic in shorthand when it comes to what was once Cohn’s most infamous life moments. But the Rosenberg conviction was 68 years ago; the McCarthy hearings were 65 years ago; his death of AIDS 33 years ago. Some of these things—particularly the McCarthy stuff—might still get regular play in TV montages, but they are rarely fully contextualized to the extent that they are here. And for the most part, Roy Cohn’s life is very well contextualized by this film, in a way that makes absolutely clear how relevant his legacy is to the state of American politics, culture, and public discourse in 2019. I’d be hard pressed to call Where’s My Roy Cohn? “entertaining,” but it is certainly fascinating.

Overall: B+