Aaron Sorkin has a style: intelligent, verbose, and stately. For the most part, viewers are either in or out. For some, he is the height of smart, liberal commentary. To others, he is insufferable. I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I love A Few Good Men and his 1990s TV show Sports Night. I admired Molly’s Game and his theatrical adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird but find The West Wing drab and dull.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 falls somewhere in the middle. It’s definitely enjoyable, a smooth ride filled with standout performances and snappy dialogue, but it is also somewhat one-dimensional and flat in its presentation. The Sixties were a wild time, and there’s plenty of nuance to be had in the telling of a historical event from that era. Sorkin forgoes that to tell a David vs. Goliath story of liberal defiance against a rigged, reactionary judicial system. 

The facts at hand are that violent clashes took place in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention between protesters and Chicago police. Eight were indicted for crossing state lines with the intention to conspire and incite a riot, including Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; leader of the Students for a Democratic Society Tom Hayden; and co-founder of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, though he was nowhere near the disturbances. Seven of them were represented by the famous civil rights attorney William Kunstler. Beginning in September 1969, the trial took half a year, and the judge clearly had his thumbs on the scale for the prosecution.

For his screenplay, Sorkin takes incidents and some actual quotes from the proceedings and adds some inventions of his own. One of the main sources of conflict is the methodology of change. Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Hoffman (Sascha Baron Cohen) are on opposite sides when it comes to rebellion. Hayden presents himself as respectful and straight-laced while Hoffman is a prankster who uses comic absurdity to take the piss out of those in power. They clearly are on the same side politically, but they despise each other’s philosophy. Sparks fly from this conflict, and each gets to get his point across. Occasionally, this ventures into emotional territory, and that’s when the actors dig in. The final confrontation between the two activists, though a tad polemical, is still electric. This is the stuff Sorkin knows how to write best.

Other than that, we mostly get black hats and white hats. The good guys are unfailingly good and the bad guys are bad for no other reason than that’s the way it is. Sorkin allows assistant prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) some depth by allowing the lawyer to have empathy for the defendants, but aside from that, our heroes are our heroes and their flaws are admirable. This flattens the story somewhat since it seems made to order.

It’s also notable that Seale was charged with the other seven defendants simply because he happened to be in Chicago for a few hours, yet the court would not try him separately or wait for his lawyer to recover from gall bladder surgery. But the film also sidelines Seale by not expanding his character outside of the courtroom, unlike Hayden and Hoffman, and thus gives actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II not as much to do. 

That being said, Sorkin knows how to make these types of movies. As we reach a crescendo during the finale, one can’t help being swept up in the film up despite its flaws (which include a third act reveal that, in tone, is lifted directly from A Few Good Men).

One thing that can’t be faulted is the acting. The performances are peerless. Baron Cohen stands out as Hoffman. He grasps the quicksilver intelligence behind Hoffman’s goofy pranks. Mark Rylance as Kunstler also does top-notch work. Only Frank Langella can’t quite overcome his face-of-the-evil-establishment role as Judge Julius Hoffman.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is decent entertainment with superb performances. One just wishes it was a tad grittier and less of a hagiography.