One zinger after another – but it’ll leave you cold: Trial of the Chicago 7 reviewed

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a courtroom drama based on true events featuring a stellar cast: Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong. You may be wondering: hang on, no Michael Keaton? But he tips up too! What, no Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Don’t worry. He’s here. But while the performances are ace and the script is one of those Sorkin scripts where the dialogue is one zinger after another — zinger ping pong, I call it — it will leave you cold emotionally. This is a film to admire, in some respects, but it will never make you feel. I wasn’t bothered who did or didn’t go to prison in the end. So long as they just got on with it.

Written and directed by Sorkin, who created The West Wing, and wrote the screenplays for A Few Good Men, Moneyball and The Social Network, among others, this follows the seven anti-Vietnam protestors who were charged with conspiracy and inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It may be different for American audiences, who are likely to be more familiar with the major players, but for the first 40 minutes or so of its two-hour running time you may well find yourself scratching your head and asking: which one is that again?

The characters are all initially introduced with their names underneath, but it’s done at such a lick it is hard for the information to register. Still, keep with it, as the defendants will eventually become clear. They include the counterculture provocateur Abbie Hoffman (Baron Cohen), his stoner comrade Jerry Rubin (Strong), the political activist Tom Hayden (Redmayne), and pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch).