An above average movie about a subject (McCarthy-ism and the Hollywood Black List in the 1950s) that's already been dealt with before, albeit not in this great a detail, and definitely not about one unique individual, Dalton Trumbo. The writing is clever - one could almost call it Trumbo-esque - and Bryan Cranston delivers probably the finest male performance of 2015. If Leonardo DiCaprio wasn't a Hollywood sweetheart, and if he hadn't been denied an Oscar several times before, and if the world we lived in was a perfect one instead, the Best Actor Oscar would've and should've been won by Cranston, hands down. The movie also does a good job at examining how his screenwriting obsession affected his family life, but it wisely never goes overboard with it, focusing instead on the man who had to write so many great scripts under different pseudonyms, because of his affiliation to the Communist Party. I suppose this is as good of a film that can be made about this particular subject, and I can't think of a better compliment than that.
B+
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