A SCREENPLAY by director Oliver Stone co-written with Kieran Fitzgerald wears this film’s heart on its sleeve and unashamedly asserts that its villain is not Edward Snowden, the IT whizz-kid now exiled in Russia after the nation that prides itself on being ruled by laws rather than by men has made him a fugitive for taking a view of cyber security at variance with the official position.

Its argument is that the true villain is the relationship between a military/industrial alliance and the National Security Agency which, in the interest of strengthening homeland security, has created IT systems that try to monitor everything. The thesis underlying that objective is that the NSA has unintentionally taken what rightly should be kept secret and made it easily accessible to bad guys. That should scare all those who by any reasonable measure see themselves as not bad guys.

To that last-mentioned category Snowden would vigorously claim to be a member in good standing. His actions were not for financial gain. Nor was he acting at the behest of a foreign power. What he made public might could, in less scrupulous hands, have become publicly available!

As Snowden, Joseph Gordon-Levitt effectively delivers that proposition. Shailene Woodley is decorative as his partner. Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage and Tom Wilkinson play characters telling the story by moving seamlessly between times and places. And, in the closing minutes, if you think you’re looking at Gordon-Levitt carrying the title role, look a little closer. It is, in fact, Edward Snowden playing himself, to my mind thereby rather firmly confirming the authenticity of what has gone before.

At all cinemas