A documentary by Greg Barker. Rating unavailable

The final year here is actually the last three fateful months of Barack Obama’s presidency. When filmmaker Greg Barker was allowed access to the White House and some of its key occupants in 2016, there was little expectation that this was more than a valedictory exercise, with one mildly progressive Democratic president about to hand over the reins to another one. Boy, was everybody wrong!

The focus in this tightly edited, globetrotting doc is less on Obama—who remains an enigmatic figure, gliding through major events—than on a small group of top officials. These are led by then secretary of state John Kerry, who carries his experience (glimpsed in archival footage) as both a soldier and a leading antiwar protester on a historic trip to Vietnam.

The filmmaker travels more extensively with Samantha Power, then ambassador to the UN, seen visiting Nigeria to meet parents of missing girls there, and officiating at a swearing-in ceremony for new citizens—doubly significant, since she is herself an immigrant from Ireland, which was called a shithole by white Americans only a century ago. And he spends considerable one-on-one time with Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief speechwriter. Rhodes talks of his “mind meld” with the president, and there’s definitely some humble-bragging in his complaints of long hours and frustrating turns of events—some self-inflicted, as when it comes to his boss’s ineffectual handling of Syria and other Pentagon-led entanglements.

Rhodes’s resemblance to Rob Corddry and to Veep’s Tony Hale underlines the film’s walking-and-talking West Wing tone, which can feel like parody at times. The kidding sure stops when Power, sitting with Gloria Steinem and Kerry predecessor Madeleine Albright, watches those shocking election results roll in. The rest of the film is devoted to Obama’s crowd trying to shore up international accomplishments—in Iran, Cuba, and elsewhere—they never expected to be undone by a racist grifter.

Hopefully, what happened in 2016 is sui generis, but all partisan loyalties aside, what’s most striking here is not the specialness of this crew as much as their now quaintly ordinary professionalism. They talk to each other, their bosses, their families, and their underlings with dignity, candour, and kindness. Most of all, they seem to know what the hell they’re doing.