“They won’t care about what you wrote because the press will make YOU the story.”

Diagnosis-Kill The Messenger is a fierce reminder that important films can still be made in Hollywood if the right people come together to make them happen and there is an audience ready to digest serious material. A lot of films are good but few actually teach you something vital about history and the way America was built. This film gets the facts straight, taking the pages of a novel and fusing them into blunt strokes of filmmaking.

Jeremy Renner powers a well-balanced cast of actors born to play these roles and puts another gold star on his acting resume with his unforgettable performance as Gary Webb, a hard charging journalist in the 90’s who pushed too hard. Webb wrote for the San Jose Mercury News and uncovered a story that connected the War on Drugs and Nicaragua drug dealers to the CIA. Webb wrote it and when bigger newspapers got mad that they weren’t the first to break the story, the flack flew back at Webb and his paper. The golden rule of newspapers (at least among the bigger ones) is simple. Be the first to break a controversial story or be the first to break it down.

Renner is amazing and the film hinges on our ability to find interest in his fight and his story. The papers did everything to smear his name and destroyed his life, and the transformation in Renner’s performance is crisp. When we first meet him, he is energetically tracking down a lead on a story and when we leave him, the entire façade of what he believed in has crumbled to the floor. Bringing to mind a younger and hungrier Sean Penn, Renner gets inside Webb’s head and shows us what made him tick and what led him to explode. (more…)