Starring Michael Keaton. Rated PG

The first big movie of the Trump era arrives in the appropriately ambivalent form of The Founder. First and foremost, this two-hour Horatio Alger story from The Blind Side director John Lee Hancock is a vehicle for Michael Keaton’s towering performance as Ray Kroc, who refined and propagated the McDonald’s formula.

This makes sense, since the tale is largely about negative charisma and sheer willpower, properties that have always marked even the gentlest of Keaton’s performances.

In this case, his manic energy is channelled into someone whose business ambitions were only about making money. The late Kroc’s name will forever be associated with the “billions served” burger empire, but as the film recalls, in detail, this Midwestern milkshake-machine salesman had exactly zero to do with the original fast-food drive-in of that name.

It was started in San Bernardino, California, by brothers Dick and Maurice “Mac” McDonald, played absolutely straight here by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch, who usually go for more comic roles. They came up with the sleek, modern efficiency system, and the iconic golden arches.

As written by Robert Siegel, former editor of The Onion, the movie doesn’t tell us that the McDonald brothers were already thinking franchise when approached in 1954 by Kroc, who was curious to see how they would use eight of his machines. The Founder elides other major players and events in this origin story, and alters the name of self-help business guru Norman Vincent Peale—who also “inspired” Donald Trump’s father—but it gets the outlines right.

These include first giving himself a rotten deal on franchise royalties and then turning around and sticking it to the bros as he got more leverage, and dumping his long-suffering wife (Laura Dern) in favour of the savvier spouse (Linda Cardellini) of an early partner in the move to go national.

The film has been accused of generating undue sympathy for Kroc, but this suit isn’t entirely empty until the moment he decides to take sole credit for the invention of McDonald’s. The subject here is really the blurred line between entrepreneurship and creativity, and that’s just as American as french fries and Coca-Cola.