Winner review – snappy, I, Tonya-esque take on Reality Winner

Reality Winner has the perfect name for a digital-era martyr – memorable and freighted, seems fake but isn’t, deeply ironic. Late-night shows had a field day in 2017 with that moniker, for a whistleblower who tried to expose the truth about Russian interference in the 2016 election and was made into a bogeyman by cable news and a meal by the Trump administration.

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The name (and those late-night bits) is acknowledged a lot in Winner, the second film about her in less than a year (the other being HBO’s Reality, taking the other obvious title option). The film, directed by Susanna Fogel (Cat Person, Booksmart) from a screenplay by the essayist Kerry Howley, seems to relish saying what it assumes the audience is thinking. What the straight-up biopic would imply, Winner outright says – this a story about what happened when she leaked evidence that the government was lying to its citizens, Reality (Coda’s Emilia Jones) explains in voiceover in the introduction. “Yeah, they don’t like it when you do that.”

Such jazzy flourishes – fourth-wall breaks of cheeky voiceover confessionals, the subject building a snappy rapport with the audience – are now an expectation unto themselves, echoing the peppy blend of fact, interpretation and personality employed in such loose biopics as Molly’s Game and I, Tonya. As in those films, Reality is an infamous woman with more of a story to tell. Ironically enough, Winner’s forthrightness sometimes gets in the way of its ability to show it.

To be clear, Winner, which premiered at the Sundance film festival, is not a retread of Reality, the film adaptation of Tina Satter’s critically acclaimed play that dramatized the transcript of Winner’s grueling interrogation by the FBI in May 2017. That film, starring Sydney Sweeney, was a tense, effective thriller, underscoring law enforcement’s insidious ability to break a person down. Winner takes a wider view, barreling through definitive scenes of her life from childhood through her four-year prison sentence, explaining the how and why behind her political act that even she ruefully acknowledges didn’t make people care.

Which is running theme: Reality has always had hills to die on and battles to fight, she explains, encouraged by her father Ron (Zach Galifianakis), an aspiring author with a cynical political bent who was unemployed for most of her childhood. It was Ron who imparted the definitive lesson from the most definitive event of her youth, 9/11: violence could be avoided if people just understood each other. A bizarrely mature and whip-smart iconoclast even as a child, she starts teaching herself Arabic as a teenager in Texas – a fact later used in court to argue that she harbored terrorist sympathies – to the bafflement of her straight-arrow mother Billie (Connie Britton), a social worker, and her more normal sister Brittany (an underused Kathryn Newton).

The film zips through the necessary information with movie-crisp dialogue and loose, plucky narration presumably derived from the subject herself, whom Howley profiled for New York magazine in 2017. Targeted by the military for her preternatural language skills, Reality skips college and directly enlists in the US air force, where she learns Dari and Pashto and seeks a deployment to Afghanistan. Instead she ends up at Fort Meade, in Maryland, translating intercepted conversations between people – sometimes families with children – thousands of miles away, so that drone operators would know whom to target.

Winner’s narrative interludes effectively relay her mental distress. To offset the punishing guilt and the mishmash of terrible news in her head, she embarks on a relationship with a bartender, Andre (Danny Ramirez), and a grueling exercise routine. (One of the film’s great successes is Anastasia Magoutas’s costume design of Reality’s tomboyish anti-fashion fashion, which feels distinctly mid-2010s.) Eventually, she ends up as a private contractor for the National Security Agency. Even at 103 minutes, Winner feels brisk; we summarily learn her disillusionment, motivation for and the execution of her crime, which feels shockingly banal and, in context, completely understandable. Her treatment by the government, on the other hand, truly appalling.

Howley is a bewitching and darkly funny nonfiction writer, and her screenplay crackles with the type of conspiratorial asides and frank admissions of a friend; her rendering of Winner, coupled with Jones’s capable performance of an endearingly brusque bleeding heart, makes for a good companion. And yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that this story is a little too neat, a little too snazzily contorted into a conventionally unconventional biopic. While Reality’s relationship with her father and Andre are movingly rendered in short bursts, there’s a confusing thinness to Brittany and Billie. In the puzzle of the real Reality Winner, there are conspicuous missing pieces, more background to sketch in.

Still, as far as zeitgeisty nonfiction goes, Winner is one of the better ones, at once entertaining and illuminative. Reality Winner may have lost, unfairly, for far too long, but in this rendition, she ends up on top.

• Winner screened at the Sundance film festival and is on digital platforms in the UK from 4 November.