Kill the Messenger (15)
Directed by Michael Cuesta
5 stars

OFTEN a film like this gripping and deeply disturbing biopic-cum-thriller, based on a true story, leaves one wondering just how much of the narrative has been sexed-up for box-office benefit.

But there’s no such concern with Kill the Messenger. It’s the disturbing story of US investigative journalist Gary Webb who, following his revelations that the CIA were aware of dealers flooding the US streets with cocaine and siphoning off the profits to fund arms shipments to the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, found his career and the lives of himself and his  family under threat.

The story is so strong, appalling anddeserving of maximum exposure that any tweaks by screenwriter Peter Landesman, drawing on Webb’s book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou’s Kill the Messenger,are dramatically justified.

The film benefits immensely from Jeremy Renner’s performance as the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who followed up material that led him to investigate and expose the septic relationship between the CIA and Nicaraguan drug lords.

This makes his ultimate fate — he was found, aged 49, with two gunshot wounds to his head and with his death ruled as suicide — all the more unspeakable. Renner’s compellingly credible performance as the journalist is strongly supported by, among others, Oliver Platt, Michael Sheen and Michael K Williams.

Director Michael Cuesta tells this horrifying story without losing dramatic momentum. But particularly impressive is his opening sequence which features newsreel footage of several US presidents speaking publicly with tongues so forked they could qualify for the snake house in a zoo.

Perhaps most chilling of all, we learn that when the CIA finally — and far from fully — owned up to their evil doing, they released the information during the Clinton-Lewinksy scandal so that media interest in anything other than the venal president’s “escapades” would be at its lowest ebb.

One of those very rare films that merit a second viewing.