Starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford. Rating unavailable.

Long ago, Robert Redford played Bob Woodward, a gutsy newspaperman who helped bring down Richard Nixon but who has since cozied up to the power elite. Here, he’s Dan Rather, a TV icon who talked back to many presidents until getting handed his head for tackling George W. Bush during his fellow Texan’s second presidential bid, in 2004.

The focus in Truth, however, is really on 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes, played superbly by Cate Blanchett as a hard-drinking, Xanax-popping newswoman already under official scrutiny for her award-winning work exposing U.S. atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison when she happened upon another make-or-break story.

It was already widely suspected that Bush ducked what little duty was expected of him during the Vietnam War. But shit got specific when a retired military man (Stacy Keach here) handed Mapes a folder of documents describing which strings were pulled to get the future war president both in and out of the Texas Air National Guard.

With Karl Rove’s tricksters busy smearing actual war hero John Kerry at the height of the Iraq debacle, the story aired, causing an instant sensation six months before the election. The keyboard warriors of the then-new blogosphere quickly picked the documents apart, thus providing an introduction to the world most of us live in today, with cascades of noisy minutiae obscuring larger stories of national import.

Alongside Topher Grace and Elisabeth Moss, the supporting cast features Houston-born Dennis Quaid, who might have made a more convincing Dan Rather. And the film, shot in Australia by writer-director James Vanderbilt—better known for his scripts for Zodiac and the last two Spider-Man movies—sketches out Mapes’s motivation too soon and too simply. Still, its lessons sting. Less an ode to broadcast journalism than a requiem for its demise, the too tidily titled Truth indicts a society that has almost giddily surrendered its right to ask tough questions.