‘Ink’ Review: Jack O’Connell and Guy Pearce Trace Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street Rise in Breathlessly Paced, Morally Opaque Danny Boyle Drama

When James Graham’s play Ink premiered in London in 2017 and jumped to Broadway two years later, director Rupert Goold infused the drama with rollercoaster momentum, extravagant musical flourishes and jolts of bawdy low comedy. Danny Boyle adopts a similar strategy with this snazzy screen adaptation, shot through with kinetic energy, convulsive editing and a liberal sprinkling of post-punk, electro-pop and indie rock that thumbs its nose at period accuracy. It’s all visually stimulating and highly enjoyable in its anti-establishment attitude, even if the impression remains that this is a morality play with an elusive point of view.

Graham, who also penned the adaptation, doesn’t pretend otherwise. Declining to preach, he simply lays out the historical facts in a compelling narrative spanning the late ‘60s to the 1980s. The material might have felt almost like docudrama if it weren’t for the crackling work of Boyle — this is unequivocally a film from the man who gave us Trainspotting — and an ace ensemble led by Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy. 

The movie is an irreverent and inventive recap of the game-changing 1969 assault of Rupert Murdoch (Pearce) on London’s starchy Fleet Street — hub of the British newspaper business. The Australian media titan enlisted Larry Lamb (O’Connell), a Yorkshireman of working-class origins, as editor of his newly acquired daily The Sun, with a mandate to make over the failing publication from a broadsheet to a tabloid, trading sober news coverage for populist content — the saucier, more scandalous and sensationalistic the better.

Just as the play did, the movie treats this transition, and the soaring rise in under a decade of the relaunched Sun to become the country’s highest-circulation daily, as a raucous caper, in which the Mephistophelean Murdoch seduces Lamb into a Faustian pact that gradually sees the editor eclipse his employer in bottom line-driven ruthlessness. 

One of Boyle and editor Fin Oates’ adrenaline-charged montages points explicitly to the radical shift of those years — the dumbing down and vulgarization of news culture — as a key stepping stone to our current post-truth, clickbait age, in which any social-media mouthpiece can spin biased opinions into widely accepted fact with enough amplification. That applies to everyone from paranoid conspiracy theorists to presidents.

The film doesn’t entirely let Murdoch off the hook for precipitating that downslide, but it does go easy on him, making the Sun proprietor ultimately more squeamish than his headstrong henchman when questions of ethics intrude. That risks leaving a sour taste in the mouths of people who see Fox News and its ilk as instrumental in the ascension of the far right. But maybe cynical times demand cynical detachment. In any case, there’s something to be said for filmmakers trusting their audience to draw its own conclusions from this period piece and its throughline to information dissemination in the 21st century.

From the opening scene — a long exchange over lunch at journo hangout Rules during which Murdoch makes his pitch to Lamb, complete with a fat salary offer and a company car of his choice — Boyle shakes up the rhythm with quick flash cuts of the manpower and machinery that make the newspaper business hum. 

Pearce is by turns low-key hilarious and intimidating as the unerringly sure-of-himself businessman, peppering his conversation with colorful Australianisms and profanity while never relaxing his laser focus. O’Connell is mostly reactive at first, with Larry skeptical about Rupert’s ambitions and hesitant to seem too eager. But he becomes increasingly tenacious once he settles into the editor’s office, a bulldog no more inclined to take no for an answer than his employer.

Murdoch is thick-skinned and accustomed to being underestimated by the condescending Brits, who see him as a crass interloper. He appeals to the mutual outsider in Lamb, who toiled away as a subeditor at leading paper The Daily Mirror until he grew impatient with his prospects for promotion under stuffy editor in chief Hugh Cudlipp (Bertie Carvel, who won both an Olivier Award and a Tony for his performance as Murdoch in the play) and retreated back up north to Manchester.

While making the paper a success is the primary goal, with Rupert predicting that the Sun will be outselling the Mirror within a year from its relaunch, the owner is not averse to the whiff of revenge he detects in Larry, eager to stick it to the establishment that has held him back.

The recruitment process — the majority of new hires poached from the Mirror — plays out in fast-paced, entertaining fashion, with meetings everywhere from a steam room to a pool hall to a Soho porn theater. Almost all the writers and editors approached initially turn up their noses at the idea of defecting to “Rupert’s shit sheet,” until salaries and job elevation win them over. 

More so than in the play, the new crew are given distinct character outlines, from plain-spoken news editor Brian (Brian Gleeson) through rough-around-the-edges sports editor Frank (Christopher Fulford) to posh deputy editor Patrick (Bernard Shrimsley), the most resistant of them to the sweeping changes Larry proposes. Even after the key positions are filled, the staff struggle to define “What exactly is a Sun story?”

The one significant holdout on Larry’s masthead wish list is Jules (Foy). But he eventually lures her over with the offer of her own page for women’s issues, something she will never get in her present job at the Mirror. Like Larry, Jules is married and has a family, but that doesn’t get in the way of their affair. 

A composite character more satisfyingly developed than her stage counterpart, Jules gives the superb Foy plenty to bite into. She’s an opinionated working-class woman disinclined to fill her column inches with the usual fluff about needlework and recipes, her drive and confidence no less robust than Larry’s. She gets on board with the plan to run multipart installments of The Sensuous Woman, an American book no British publisher at the time would touch. That series is credited with ushering in a new openness in Britain around female sexuality. 

When Larry invites staff to share the interests they would like to see in the Sun’s pages, chief subeditor Ray (Blake Harrison) chimes in with “I like women … boobs and bums.” Jules goes along with the push to include “tasteful” photos of scantily clad models, though she balks when Larry insists on going a step further, introducing the notorious Brit tabloid staple of the topless “page three girl.”

The scenes that generate the most sparks tend to be those between Murdoch and Lamb, becoming more adversarial when the editor starts operating by his own rules. Rupert is dissatisfied with the inaugural issue, calling it “a cheap copy of the Mirror.” But Larry’s public humiliation by Cudlipp at the Press Council Awards is the incentive he needs to take off the gloves.  

Major conflict emerges when Larry charges ahead with the Sun’s coverage of the kidnapping of Muriel McKay (Lucy Russell), wife of Murdoch’s senior executive Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde), both of whom had relocated from Australia for the company’s British expansion. The shocking details of the crime and its outcome sparked a media frenzy, and Lamb’s controversial editorial choices create friction with everyone from Jules to Rupert, from the union workers operating the printing presses to Scotland Yard.

Ink — opening Dec. 11 in the U.S. and streaming on Netflix from Jan. 8 — in many ways is a rise-and-fall story, played with aggressive self-determination but not monomaniacal monstrousness by O’Connell. The movie is also a chronicle of the degradation of what passes for news reporting; Sun staffers are told that every murder, rape or theft has to be written up like a thriller. And for anyone with affection for the bygone newsroom, it’s a rich evocation of a milieu now on life support.

Boyle, his cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler and production and costume designers Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh (both of whom come from the director’s 28 Years Later and Nia DaCosta’s follow-up The Bone Temple) excel at shaping a vivid sense of a time and place, with added texture in moments when the visuals assume the grainy halftones of vintage newsprint. 

The integration of Daniel Pemberton’s propulsive score with Boyle’s typically punchy song selections is seamless. Sequences like the staffing overtures set to Sprints’ “Something Gonna Happen” or the relaunched Sun finding its groove to IDLES’ “The New Sensation” recall the visceral charge of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” over Ewan McGregor’s “Choose Life” monologue in the Trainspotting opening.

Even if the final payoff feels a bit muted, Ink is a solid demonstration that if you want to give talky material pulse-pounding urgency, give it to Danny Boyle.