‘Ink’ Review: Jack O’Connell and Guy Pearce Trace Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street Rise in Breathlessly Paced, Morally Opaque Danny Boyle Drama

When James Graham’s play Ink premiered in London in 2017 and jumped to Broadway two years later, director Rupert Goold infused the drama with rollercoaster momentum, extravagant musical flourishes and jolts of bawdy low comedy. Danny Boyle adopts a similar strategy with this snazzy screen adaptation, shot through with kinetic energy, convulsive editing and a liberal sprinkling of post-punk, electro-pop and indie rock that thumbs its nose at period accuracy. It’s all visually stimulating and highly enjoyable in its anti-establishment attitude, even if the impression remains that this is a morality play with an elusive point of view. Related Stories Movies From Murdoch to Musk: This Year's Venice Lineup Is Its "Most Political Ever" Movies Meryl Streep, Laura Poitras Join 'My Undesirable Friends: Part II' as Exec Producers (Exclusive)

Graham, who also penned the adaptation, doesn’t pretend otherwise. Declining to preach, he simply lays out the historical facts in a compelling narrative spanning the late ‘60s to the 1980s. The material might have felt almost like docudrama if it weren’t for the crackling work of Boyle — this is unequivocally a film from the man who gave us Trainspotting — and an ace ensemble led by Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy . Ink The Bottom Line A chronicle more than a critique, but vigorously entertaining. Venue : Venice Film Festival (Competition) Release date : Weds., Dec. 11 (Jan. 8 streaming) Cast : Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce, Claire Foy, Bertie Carvel, Brian Gleeson, Christopher Fulford, Patrick Kennedy, Blake Harrison, Jonathan Hyde, Lucy Russell, Abigail Amin, Georgie Henley Director : Danny Boyle Screenwriter : James Graham, based on his play 1 hour 56 minutes

The movie is an irreverent and inventive recap of the game-changing 1969 assault of Rupert Murdoch (Pearce) on London’s starchy Fleet Street — hub of the British newspaper business. The Australian media titan enlisted Larry Lamb (O’Connell), a Yorkshireman of working-class origins, as editor of his newly acquired daily The Sun , with a mandate to make over the failing publication from a broadsheet to a tabloid, trading sober news coverage for populist content — the saucier, more scandalous and sensationalistic the better.

Just as the play did, the movie treats this transition, and the soaring rise in under a decade of the relaunched Sun to become the country’s highest-circulation daily, as a raucous caper, in which the Mephistophelean Murdoch seduces Lamb into a Faustian pact that gradually sees the editor eclipse his employer in bottom line-driven ruthlessness.

One of Boyle and editor Fin Oates’ adrenaline-charged montages points explicitly to the radical shift of those years — the dumbing down and vulgarization of news culture — as a key stepping stone to our current post-truth, clickbait age, in which any social-media mouthpiece can spin biased opinions into widely accepted fact with enough amplification.