Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

“Some people are saying” . . . that Bombshell doesn’t quite let former FOX News anchors Gretchen Carlson or Megyn Kelly “off the hook” for the broader structure of misinformation and oppressive propaganda they supported by ever having worked at the network to begin with. Having seen the film, I’m not sure where that idea comes from; to a person, the women shown to have been sexually harassed by Roger Ailes are depicted as entirely sympathetic characters, even though there is plenty of reason to feel contempt for them regardless of how they were legitimately mistreated by the system they helped prop up for years.

That said, upon further reflection, I’m not sure that angle has any direct relevance to the telling of this particular story. The moral standing of these women’s politics is not what Bombshell is about, and if director Jay Roach (The Campaign, Trumbo) and writer Charles Randolph (The Big Short) had made this more about that, it would have distracted from the issue at hand, which is what a vile pig of a man Roger Ailes was, and the women who brought him down for it.

Something else entirely about this movie comes rather close to being its own distraction: how convincingly the actors look like a lot of the real-life people they portray. Of all the principal players, only Margot Robbie plays a composite character, named Kayla; all the others are real people, from John Lithgow as Roger Ailes, to several bit parts like Malcolm McDowell as Rupert Murdoch, Richard Kind as Rudi Jiuliani, Kevin Dorff as Bill O’Reilly, Spencer Garrett as Sean Hannity, Tony Plana as Geraldo Rivera. Some of these appearances feel like stunts; even a couple of times—though certainly not with all of them—even I had to take a second to convince myself I wasn’t actually looking at the real person. Even Charlize Theron is so convincingly transformed as Megyn Kelly, with a deft combination of makeup and prosthetics, the movie begins with a title card assuring us that none of the real people being portrayed are ever actually seen onscreen unless in archival footage.

But, I got past any such distractions pretty quickly. Bombshell is so well acted, and for the most part well edited, that it’s surprisingly entertaining from the start, sometimes even funny, before it movies into the fairly frank revelations of what Roger Ailes asked these women to do for him in his office. It seems appropriate, then, for Kayla to be a composite character, as she is the only one with a dedicated scene showing the first step in Ailes’s harassing tactics. He first asks her to “give him a twirl,” and then asks her to lift her skirt up so he can see her legs, higher and higher until her underwear is showing. This way, at least, we’re not watching any single real-life woman going through this. It’s still a scene that is as awkward as it is gross, eliciting a very specific kind of squirming, horrified discomfort. And that is precisely the point, as is the fact that in this context, these women deserve protection and they deserve justice, regardless of what their politics are or who they work for.

In the beginning scenes, Bombshell is slightly too preoccupied with a snappy presentation, and skates through a few plot points a bit too quickly. The whole business with then-candidate Donald Trump saying Megyn Kelly was “blood coming out of her wherever” is addressed directly, but also kind of glossed over. It’s fairly quickly contextualized as background in early difficulties between Kelly and her employer, as Ailes is initially presented as coming to her defense. Much of Bombshell is about Megyn Kelly trying to decide whether she should come forward at all, after fighting a losing battle over the fallout from her rift with Trump. But, she reveals to her own staff that she had been harassed by Ailes herself roughly a decade before, and she makes this revelation in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s meticulously planned lawsuit against him in the wake of being fired without cause.

A lot of comparisons have been made between Bombshell and last year’s Vice, which had similarly impressive physical transformations to depict real-life people. The key difference, though, is that Vice made the most vile person in that story—Dick Cheney—its protagonist, and none of its principal players were particularly sympathetic characters. For Bombshell to be truly comparable, it would have to have made Roger Ailes the protagonist. Ailes, as portrayed by John Lithgow with just the right amount of slimy creepiness, is appropriately relegated to the role of the villain. It’s the women’s story being told here, which is as it should be, Theron, Robbie, and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson are all excellent as women who may all be perfectly deserving of criticism for other reasons, but not for their experiences with Roger Ailes.

Even all that is not entirely black and white, though, and Bombshell does address that, with one of the few scenes showing any of these three women actually interacting with one another. Kayla can’t understand why Megyn did not come forward sooner, which could have prevented her own as well as many other women’s experiences. Then again, as Megyn notes in another scene, “I’m damned for coming forward, or I’m damned for not doing it sooner.”

For a movie that distills a pretty vast and complex story down to 108 minutes, Bombshell succeeds remarkably well. It slightly falls victim to the limitations of the form, but it’s also in a medium that gets the widest audience (well, aside from cable news itself, perhaps). It’s a worthy story compellingly told, by turns entertaining (Kate McKinnon as a secret lesbian Democrat working at FOX News because she couldn’t get hired anywhere else, at the desk next to Kayla’s, was actually a nice touch, I thought) and deeply disturbing. This movie is realistic about what happens in real life, but lacks the deep cynicism of a movie like Vice, which is what makes it better. This one is imperfect but illuminating, and very much worth the time.

Overall: B+