The Front Runner Review

An unbroken prowl through a 1984 campaign night opens the film, satellite trucks and reporters talking over each other, announcing a picture that wants to work in the Altman register. Jason Reitman keeps that overlapping chatter running for two hours without ever deciding whose story he is telling. Gary Hart stays a closed door. Jackman plays him as a man who believes the question is beneath him, a defensible reading and a dramatically inert one, because a character who refuses to explain himself gives the film nothing to push against.

The reporters are better drawn than the candidate. J.K. Simmons, as the campaign manager watching a certainty evaporate in six days, does the most with the least. The scene that lands is Sara Paxton as Donna Rice in a hotel room, realising her life has been reassigned to her without her consent, and the movie is honest enough to sit still for it.

Vera Farmiga gets one strong exchange and is otherwise furniture. Reitman wants to ask whether the press crossed a line in 1987 and then flinches from answering, so the balance he keeps reads as timidity rather than rigour, and the last act simply runs out of campaign.