Somerville resident William Falcetano chimes in with his occasional movie review for Off the Shelf:

Our fate, whether we like it or not, is that the cinema has become our history textbook. It is from movies that people learn about the Holocaust, President Kennedy’s assassination, Iwo Jima. Film can be propaganda or education; and as in education the student must carefully select the teacher. In the case of Jay Roach’s tribute film to Dalton Trumbo we have an example of how the cinema can be both educator and entertainer.

Mr. Roach pits against each other two powerful performers – Bryan Cranston, whose Walter White of Breaking Bad and whose portrayal of President Johnson on Broadway has catapulted him into the stratosphere of stars, and Dame Helen Mirren, who has spent her whole career in that elevated rank of best actors. These strong-willed figures engage in a titanic, high-stakes struggle full of mutual loathing that forms the central dramatic axis of this moveable feast of a film. Both characters – the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and his nemesis the Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper – are so finely accoutered, so impeccably dressed, and so authentically turned out that you would think you were thrust back into the postwar world of the late 1940s by some sort of virtual reality machine. These ultra-real touches are set side by side with actual black-and-white footage from the era, depicting people in newsreels or in film. But Mr. Roach goes one further and includes “rusticated” versions of his own faux-authentic film. At the very end of the movie the audience is given a chance to judge the faithfulness of Mr. Cranston’s Dalton Trumbo when footage of the actual Mr. Trumbo appears.

What we remember today as “the McCarthy era” was a kind of miasma of fear and paranoia that spread through the country. Hardly anyone was untouched by it; even those who acquitted themselves well for a time, such as the great Edward G. Robinson, wavered, buckled under the pressure, or cooperated with the witch hunt to give up information (“I only gave them what they already knew”, Robinson, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, protests).

When we meet Dalton Trumbo he is at the height of his career on a stage set with Edward G. Robinson, who is playing a gangster, holding a revolver in a period-perfect film noir stage set – this is a movie about movie-making. Trumbo signs a contract with Louis B. Mayer (Richard Portnow), head of Metro-Goldwin-Mayer Studios, for a record sum – he is the best paid writer in Hollywood. But the right-wing gossip monger Hedda Hopper is playing hard ball; she corners the legendary movie producer in his office; sitting on the couch where he once tried to seduce her (he failed), she threatens him into breaking his contract with Trumbo (he does). An audible gasp went up from the audience when Mirren delivers an ethnic slur like a punch below the belt. She is Evil personified decked out in kid gloves and elegant millenary.

Then it all falls apart, as other actors, led by John “Duke” Wayne, played with convincing heft by David James Elliot, Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, and Robert Taylor, form a committee of their own to uphold “American ideals.” Reagan and Taylor are seen giving testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo is imprisoned, as one of “the Hollywood Ten”, for contempt of congress; after he is released, he cannot find work – he’s been blacklisted. (“What’s your position on the blacklist?” a reporter asks – “on it” was his terse and witty reply.)

The next part of the film depicts Mr. Trumbo’s slow, arduous ascent from this low point in the 1950s to the rehabilitation of his reputation – and his career – in the 1960s, ending with his acceptance speech in 1970, when he receives a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Writers Guild. Mr. Cranston brings out the true grit and calm toughness of Dalton Trumbo – who not only served time in prison for his ideals, he clawed his way back into the game script by script, revising the work of hacks, and writing his own screenplays for the mercenary B movie mogul Frank King, played with gruffness and gleeful corpulence by John Goodman. One of these scripts – The Brave One – wins the academy award for “best story”, only to be received by a representative of the Screen Writers Guild on behalf of the fictional “Robert Rich”, pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, who watches the festivities on TV surrounded by his cheering family.

It was his family that gave him heart through this trial by fire, and it was his family that pulled together to keep the secret machine running smoothly to pay the bills. Dalton’s daughter Nikola Trumbo, played by Elle Fannnig, was a consultant on the film. She ends up taking on her father’s toughness and his ideals after the obligatory adolescent struggle. Trumbo’s wife Cleo is played by the amazing Diane Lane who portrays the loyal 1950s wife with a twist by standing up to her husband when his tyrannical quest not to be beaten by “them” turns him into a bully. The courage to stand up to bullies is what this movie is all about.

The big breakthrough comes when the great director Otto Preminger (played by a bald Christian Berkel) bucks the system and credits Dalton Trumbo for the screenplay for Exodus; then Kirk Douglas (played here with uncanny resemblance by Dean O’Gorman) credits Trumbo with the blockbuster Spartacus, the sword and sandal epic starring Douglas as the slave-turned-revolutionary, and Lawrence Olivier, who appears in a scene from the film in bad Roman drag. Trumbo is a film about films and the business of movie-making, in which writers write about writers, and vindicate a noble craft along with one of the martyrs of that profession who stood up for the ideals of free expression/association. Against him were powerful and popular figures such as John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Hedda Hopper, who wrapped themselves in the flag in the name of “American ideals.”