The Front Runner (2018)

Jack and I enjoyed this tale of Gary Hart's failed 1988 presidential campaign and looked forward to seeing it despite its tepid reviews. Hugh Jackman (last blogged for The Greatest Showman) is perfect as the charismatic and confident Hart and Vera Farmiga (after writing about her in The Judge, I thought we saw her in Boundaries (2018), but I didn't write about it) is also good as his cool and calm wife Lee. The cast is huge, and most characters have defined personalities. Some noteworthy ones are J.K. Simmons (most recently in Zootopia) as campaign manager Bill Dixon, Mark O'Brien (last blogged for Arrival) as staffer Billy Shore, Sara Paxton (new to me despite many credits) as Donna Rice, Mamoudou Athie (after his first appearance in these pages for Patti Cake$ he was in eight episodes of The Get Down as Grandmaster Flash) as reporter AJ Parker, and Alfred Molina (after I wrote about him in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot he was in eight episodes of Feud: Bette and Joan) as Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post.

Director/co-writer Jason Reitman (last blogged for Tully) keeps everything moving with the story based on the 2014 book All the Truth Is Out by Matt Bai and the screenplay cowritten by Bai (his screenwriting debut; he played himself on one episode of House of Cards) and Jay Carson (also a debut and he was co-producer of 39 episodes of House of Cards).

We liked the Colorado locations but, apparently it was shot in Georgia. Also, one goof is a card on the screen that reads "Four years later" after 1984 but it actually cuts to three years later in 1987.

Composer Rob Simonsen's (after Tully he scored 58 episodes of Life in Pieces) work can be streamed on both spotify and Apple Music. Fourteen songs are listed on imdb, including Dave Brubeck's Unsquare Dance, a personal favorite with now three mentions in this blog in a year and a half. Note that Farmiga does her own classical piano playing in the movie.

As I said, tepid, with Rotten Tomatoes' critics averaging 58% and its audiences 52. Gone from big screens in these parts (we saw it two and a half weeks ago), the movie is scheduled for DVD release and streaming in February 2019. It won't waste your time, especially if you remember the events, are an unabashed liberal, or a big fan of any of the cast.