On demand: "American Dharma"

Another of Errol Morris's occasional feature-length studies of notable public figures, 2018's American Dharma found itself mired in some controversy after its initial screenings, to the extent it barely travelled in the way last year's comparatively simpler The Pigeon Tunnel did. The controversy derived from Morris's choice of subject: Steve Bannon, the producer-director turned libertarian guru who had as much to do with the election of Donald Trump as anyone, and who has spent the years since roaming the globe preaching endless culture war. Here is one of those next-level bullshitters who, much like Jordan Peterson, Dominic Cummings and Andrew Tate, harnessed the power of the Internet to bolster his personal profile and briefly achieved notoriety in the mid-2010s before being comprehensively found out. (Bannon was sentenced to jail time in October 2022, having been found in contempt of a Congressional investigation into the events of January 6th; he is due to be released before November's election.) On the surface, Morris's film represents an effort to meet its subject in the middle: he sets Bannon, who must have entertained some suspicions, in a mock-up of Gregory Peck's briefing room from Twelve O'Clock High, a formative text of Bannon's youth, and invites him to talk about the notionally neutral subject of movies. Bannon, we learn, was for many years a regular at the Telluride film festival; he was inspired to go into filmmaking after seeing a Q&A Morris gave after a screening of 2003's The Fog of War; and the documentarist duly digs out clips from the cinematic hymn Bannon subsequently composed to Reaganism. (A more conventional Ronnie biopic starring Dennis Quaid has just opened in the US behind the Beetlejuice reboot: the undead walk among us anew.) Gradually, inevitably, the conversation expands beyond art to life, a sly process by which Morris begins to reveal something of Bannon's character and philosophy, and possibly how we all got to this fraught moment in history.

So who is Steve Bannon, exactly? The first of many contradictions: a garrulous lone wolf. A man on a perpetual war footing, who chiefly absorbed from mid-century American cinema not its romanticism or emotionality (he speaks neither of Sirk nor Doris Day), but its thick streaks of fatalism and paranoia. He has the down-and-dirty instincts of a tabloid muckraker - cf. his lipsmacking account of Anthony Weiner's downfall, which he helped engineer during his tenure at the right-wing website Breitbart - but sincerely regards himself as a latter-day Patton or MacArthur. (Even now, you suspect, he's probably sat in his cell, considering himself a prisoner-of-war: as Morris discovers, The Bridge on the River Kwai looms large in his mindset.) He has an armoury of stats to bolster his every argument, and could doubtless make up a few more if he were losing; in a pointed formal touch, Morris loads Bannon-derived headlines onto the screen like bullets in a chamber. Bannon even demonstrates blunt flashes of strategic brilliance, which collectively suggest how he outmanoeuvred the pinko-liberal snowflake Left in the summer and autumn of 2016. (Of course, dark arts and dirty money can only help.) The controversy resides in the extent to which Morris lets Bannon talk; the argument is that blowhards like this don't need another platform right now, and may be best left alone to blow themselves out. There is, certainly, material here that will be deeply discomfiting to liberal-minded viewers who've long since tagged Bannon as among the foremost boogeymen de nos jours. You may, for one, find yourself nodding in instinctive agreement with Bannon's anti-elite stance, and stirred by his calls for an urgent redistribution of wealth, for an end to pointless, costly overseas conflicts. (Even if you sense an innately bellicose individual starting to contradict himself once more.) At one point, Bannon declares a - granted, begrudging - respect for the support Bernie Sanders has drawn in recent years. His talk of dharma - interpreted here as duty or destiny - suggests this is not an entirely unspiritual man.

Yet in apparently allowing his subject to dictate the terms of this negotiation, Morris spots (and shows) how rapidly men of the libertarian stripe run out of niceties and pieties and drift towards far less appealing extremes. There is merit in letting Bannon get comfortable, to let him think he's winning the war of words, even as the words that then drop from his lips are enough to give anyone who hasn't swigged the MAGA Kool-Aid the most severe of pause and heartburn. When Morris sheepishly confesses he voted for Hillary, it's couched in a way Bannon can only ever hear as an admission of weakness - and yet it's also a palms-up show of honesty that lures Bannon into extending his generally contemptuous air into outright Islamophobia. Similarly, all Bannon's highfalutin talk of cryptocurrency - tool of a brave new world and a fully deregulated America - is finally revealed as a means of ripping off gamers with disposable income. There seems little point in taking the fight to Bannon in this context, because a) that's what he'd expect, and b) that's what he's spent his whole life training for. (The briefing room is his spiritual home.) Morris instead plays a longer, wilier game, exposing his subject as another grabby boomer who's constructed an elaborate ideology ("an apocalyptic rationalist," Bannon grandly dubs himself) to achieve his ends. We might still quibble with some of the archive on this particular project. Time and again, we have endure Trump's peacocking, which was insufferable at the time, and is barely less so now the candidate has descended into sub-Grampa Simpson, Hannibal Lecter-fetishising senility. Yet even this works towards a sense that what Bannon brought about back there wasn't the desired revolution so much as a short-term con job: a show of unimpeachable potency and will that needed smart(er) heads around - like Bannon, like Cummings - to spin and sell it to the masses. Bannon was still at it as Morris found him, insisting being cast out from the White House was a logical development so Trump could stand supreme on his own two feet; yet it seems equally plausible Trump was simply too dumb to realise what he was losing in banishing Bannon. (Hence 2020.) Morris, for his part, only succeeds in drawing his subject out of the dark and into the light. The Bannon he films is patently a dangerous man to have anywhere near a seat of public office - but that's why he was so effective in 2016, and that's why he's behind bars now. American Dharma is less the glowing portrait its fiercest critics insisted than it is the confessions of a pyromaniac.

American Dharma is currently available to stream here.