All the Way

This was a Broadway play first, and Bryan Cranston won a Tony for the same role in 2014. Robert Schenkkan adapted his own play, Jay Roach directed it for HBO, and Cranston carried Lyndon B. Johnson to the screen. It aired on HBO on 21 May 2016. The subject is one year: November 1963 to November 1964. Made president overnight by Kennedy's assassination, Johnson has to win the 1964 election and get the Civil Rights Act through Congress. Both at once is not possible; passing the bill means losing the Democratic South, and he proceeds knowing it. The film's interest is not ideology but bargaining. Johnson threatens, pleads, deceives and shouts down telephones; politics here is shown as pressure rather than persuasion. Anthony Mackie plays Martin Luther King and Melissa Leo plays Lady Bird Johnson, with Frank Langella as Senator Richard Russell. Who it is for: viewers who like political process narratives and biographical drama carried by one performance. Who it is not for: anyone who wants the civil rights movement at the centre. The film looks out from inside the White House, and the movement itself stays largely in the background.