Bryan Cranston elevates political biopic 'Trumbo'

Jay Roach's Hollywood biopic "Trumbo" lapses into simplicity and awkward flourishes, but its core message - everybody loses when people are demonized for their politics - couldn't be more relevant.

Unless you think such a thing could never happen again. Right?

Bryan Cranston, star of AMC's cult series "Breaking Bad," melds aristocratic gravitas with working-class sentiment as the titular Dalton Trumbo, the highest-paid writer in Hollywood history during the late 1940s.

Roach's visually constrained drama, serviceably written by John McNamara from Bruce Cook's book "Dalton Trumbo," whisks the writer through his early prosperous years, until the postwar United States abruptly turns anti-Communist and embarks on its greatest witch hunt since the Salem trials.

Trumbo and other Hollywood writers get hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and grilled on their leftist politics. Ten of them refuse to name names and cooperate, so the "Hollywood 10" get tossed in the slammer for contempt of Congress.

Once freed, the blacklisted writer goes about his craft under the radar, writing screenplays using nom de plumes - and not collecting Oscars for his work on "The Brave One" and "Roman Holiday" - even writing for pre-Roger Cormanesque schlock producers the King brothers (the riotously comic John Goodman and Stephen Root).

Cranston goes full-throttle Oscar-bait with a strong performance evoking the cigarette-holder grandness of an Ian Fleming with the eccentricity of a Hunter S. Thompson. (Trumbo works best naked in a filled bathtub.)

The supporting cast members emanate their own brand of quirkiness, with Helen Mirren as Hollywood columnist and ruthless political bully Hedda Hopper, Dean O'Gorman nailing a spot-on (if restrained) Kirk Douglas, David James Elliott approximating the caricatured John Wayne, Michael Stuhlbarg as a cooperative Edward G. Robinson, Christian Berkel as an intimidating Otto Preminger and Louis C.K. as fellow commie writer Arlen Hird.

The effervescent Diane Lane plays Trumbo's long-suffering, supportive wife Cleo in the drama's domestic subplot, hindered by a forced, Hollywood happy resolution to years of Trumbo neglecting his family to work and beat the system.

In the end, President Kennedy and the two movies ("Exodus" and "Spartacus") to put Trumbo's name in the credits finally killed the Hollywood blacklisting of tainted artists.

But do we really need that long, lingering shot of Hedda Hopper looking sad and defeated as she realizes her bully power is gone? Would Trumbo write a shot this schadenfreude-ishly triumphant?