UNLESS you’re a groupie passionate about military hardware, mobile phones or TV equipment, the anachronisms and goofs in this film based on the memoir “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan” by Kim Barker will have no significance.

Tina Fey, best known as a comedienne, undergoes a significant style shift playing TV news reporter Barker, sent in the early 2000s to cover the Afghanistan conflict.

For co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa to deal with how they will, Robert Carlock’s screenplay picks the eyes out of Barker’s book, decorates it with a workplace romance, energises its impact with personal and personality vignettes and salts the dialogue with refreshingly valid vocabulary such as is still not permitted on newspaper pages despite being readily available on TV. By and large, the result is good entertainment value. And Tina Fey’s performance is a major reason.

The cast all perform convincingly. Australian Margot Robbie is sexually-overheated reporter Tanya Vanderpoel playing drinking games among the international media contingent safe in Kabul. Alfred Molina plays Afghan attorney-general Sadiq, in whose office a curtain shields a fully-equipped boudoir awaiting Kim’s submission.

Martin Freeman as Iain, who films his own interviews in the field becomes Kim’s best bedroom buddy. Billy Bob Thornton plays the Marine Corps general managing the war in the region.

The plot is of necessity spotty, covering six years in which Kim learned hard lessons about living and working in Afghanistan. The tensions, sustained more by implication than substantiation, pose the question, WTF made her stick the gig for so long. The film’s answer reflects the ethos underlying the craft of war correspondents of either gender. The story’s the thing.

At all cinemas