True Story (2015)

True Story arrives in 2015 with the sober bearing of a film that believes journalism is a moral crucible. Jonah Hill plays Michael Finkel, a New York Times Magazine writer fired for inventing a composite character. Finkel then finds his identity borrowed by James Franco's Christian Longo, a man accused of killing his wife and three children. The two men sit across prison tables and trade confessions about storytelling. It is a two-hander about liars, and it takes itself very seriously indeed.

The cultural ledger here is thin. The cast is white from top to bottom, and the film never pauses to consider that fact or anything adjacent to it. Felicity Jones, as Finkel's wife Jill, is granted one scene of moral clarity in which she calls Longo a narcissistic murderer, and then the film returns to its men. Race, climate, class, disability, and sexuality are simply not on the agenda. There is a faint gesture toward media industry precarity when Finkel loses his job, though the film has no interest in wealth or capital beyond the price of a book deal. The film does carry a thesis about truth and deception, delivered through character drama instead of a pulpit, which keeps the sermonizing at a low hum.

Classification: a well-tailored, well-acted piece of moral seriousness that predates the current cultural weather and shows no interest in anticipating it. The film's conscience is real but antique. It belongs to an earlier era of prestige drama, one that assumed a white male protagonist's crisis was universal currency. It is a museum piece, and a decent one, filed under the wrong decade.