Again this promising movie: The Chicago 7 trial

Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong, two of the stars of Aaron Sorkin's new film

As a screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin often has difficulty sketching female characters with dramatic nuance and depth. In addition, from time to time, it relies on narrative tools with a more theatrical than cinematic resonance and sometimes exaggerates the sentimentality of certain scenes. His first film as a director, Master Bet, was a demonstration of all those missteps that, to a lesser extent, are also present in The Trial of the Chicago 7, the film that Netflix premieres today. Of course, the film, based on the legal conflict that arose as a result of the protests carried out by a group of young activists against the Vietnam War in 1968, also exposes all of Sorkin's strengths as a writer and filmmaker who, put in the balance, they far outweigh their weaknesses.

To tell what happened at the trial and reconstruct the events that occurred during the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of young people to Chicago, Sorkin built an impeccable, agile script, full of his signature marks. Known for the scenes in which his characters walk quickly while speaking the parliaments with a similar rhythm, a device known as walk and talk, this time the director uses it to start the different lines of the story with remarkable effectiveness. But not only that: in the face of tragic events that helped change the history of the United States, Sorkin uses humor not as comic relief but as one more element that gives his characters credibility. That it is Sacha Baron Cohen, playing the militant iconoclast Abbie Hoffman, who is responsible for the funniest moments of the plot, speaks of the intelligence of the director who also puts the intense Jeremy Strong (Succession) as the Sancho Panza of his long-haired Quixote.