Steven Spielberg directed The Post while editing his film Ready Player One, but you’d never know his attention was divided. The Post is a propulsive pseudo-thriller, anchored by typically strong performances by Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, that focuses on the Washington Post’s 1971 publication of the incriminating “Pentagon Papers” that detailed that the US government had been lying for decades about the Vietnam War. The film puts you in the middle of the action with the team of journalists that helped expose the truth.

Meryl Streep stars as Washington Post owner Kay Graham, alongside Tom Hanks as executive editor Ben Bradlee (his Boston accent leaves something to be desired). The supporting cast is a murderer’s row of all-stars such as Bradley Whitford, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Sarah Paulson, Carrie Coon, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Spielberg called up the best actors on television and borrowed their talents for this story. No role is wasted, but Odenkirk is the standout. He manages to make putting change into a payphone a tense and dramatic sequence.

This is one of Spielberg’s few films with a female lead. Obviously, Meryl Streep is up to the task. It’s incredible to see Streep as a nervous woman, seemingly out of her element and underestimated by the men around her. Hanks is harsher as Bradlee than you may be accustomed to seeing (an f-bomb or two is dropped), but he easily goes toe-to-toe with Streep.

Many comparisons have been drawn between this film and 2015 Best Picture winner Spotlight. They even share a co-writer! While both feature a team of journalists who are very good at their jobs, The Post is more focused on Kay Graham’s journey towards being an effective leader of the Washington Post, rather than the ramifications of what reporting on the Catholic Church’s scandal will do to the Boston community and to the reporters themselves. The events of The Post hardly span a week, and you feel their deadline tick closer and closer every scene. The editing is sublime. The climactic moment is a conference call, and yet it feels every character is staring into each other’s eyes.

There are a few moments that seem a little on the nose (how many crowds of adoring women can Meryl wade through?), and like most Spielberg films it should end fifteen minutes sooner than it does, but overall this is a clean-cut story of journalistic courage in the face of a corrupt administration. It’s the kind of story many of us need to see right now and keep with us as our national nightmare continues to unfold.

The Post
2017
dir. Steven Spielberg
115 min.

Now playing at Kendall Square Cinema