Muckraker Gary Webb blew the lid off the Contra-cocaine connection and paid for it with his life. In Michael Cuesta's Kill the Messenger, he's depicted as part Woodward and Bernstein, and part Serpico.
Jeremy Renner plays Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News whose sources lead him to connect the dots between the CIA and drug kingpins (a.k.a. Dark Alliance) like Freeway Ricky Ross in 1996. He's a pretty typical hard-drinking, chain-smoking journalist who doesn't take no for an answer. As he dives into the rabbit hole, Webb's family - his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and three kids - gets increasingly unraveled.
But this is mostly a newsroom drama, pitting Webb against the paper's higher ups, who eventually succumb to pressure from other papers (Los Angeles Times, Washington Post) and distance themselves from his reporting. It's clearly a case of the media eating itself.
Prone to paranoia, Webb's the perfect target for spooks that come of the woodwork once he starts digging too deep. One day a media hero, the next discredited, Webb plunges to emotional depths and ultimately can't find his way out. He committed suicide in 2004 at age 49.
The convincing Renner leads a solid cast that includes Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Webb's conflicted editor, Oliver Platt, Ray Liotta, Tim Blake Nelson, Andy Garcia, Michael Sheen, Michael K. Williams, Robert Patrick and Barry Pepper.
Kill the Messenger opens Friday.
