“Good Night, and Good Luck” is elegant, gripping and, at 93 minutes, brief to the point of poetry. Directed by George Clooney and originally conceived as a live-broadcast TV special, it bears many similarities to 2000’s Clooney-produced live-broadcast “Fail Safe.” Both are black-and-white Cold War dramas with themes that remain powerful today, but where “Fail Safe” tells a fictional story about a U.S. nuclear bomber mistakenly dispatched to the Soviet Union, “Good Night, and Good Luck” retells with great, sparse precision a story that is all too true—that of legendary radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow’s duel with Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The movie is uncannily effective for how little there is to it; rather than trying to present some type of untold, behind-the-scenes story, it actually focuses almost wholly on the actual episodes of Murrow’s CBS television show, “See It Now,” after Murrow (David Strathairn)  and co-producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) finally decided to take a public stand against Sen. McCarthy’s “red scare” tactics.

The brief pieces of character development that occur between episodes act simply to provide some personal and historical context for the very public showdown between Murrow and McCarthy, and the movie’s most powerful moments come out of history itself, both as Strathairn channels Murrow and re-creates for us his eloquent pleas to America for reason, accountability and fairness, and in the original footage we repeatedly see onscreen. Especially wonderful is the footage of McCarthy himself, who, when given the opportunity to rebut Murrow on Murrow’s own show without editing or interference, promptly took that rope and hung himself with it on national television, revealing himself as an angry, paranoid and dangerous man more definitively than any external editorializing ever could.

“Good Night, and Good Luck” is a celebration of the power of words and reason over personality and fear, and a lament for the lost opportunities that television has squandered over the years. As the movie points out, shortly after playing a pivotal role in turning back McCarthyism—an act for which we, as a nation, owe his memory a great debt—Murrow was phased out to make way for more game show programming.

directed by George Clooney
written by Grant Heslov
starring George Clooney, David Strathairn
Rated PG for mild thematic elements and brief language