“Daddy, are you a communist?” Nicola sits astride the family pony, as her father, Dalton Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston), offers a careful analogy: if she made the choice to share her packed lunch with another child who had none, she’d be a communist too. This trite reduction – with all the scope of a thought-provoking meme – is the nearest the film comes to any real engagement with the C-word. Trumbo is no history, let alone a radical history, but rather that timeless reaffirmation of the American constitution and the rights of the (white) American (male).

In 1947 the Hollywood Ten came before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. They were screenwriters and directors with unfashionable political leanings. When all refused to cooperate—to meet that toxic question, ‘Are you now, or have you ever been…’ – they were convicted for contempt. The studios, initially indignant that the state should dare meddle with free enterprise—free expression – soon sensed the changing tide of opinion and baulked. Communist sympathisers would not be employed. While many emigrated to Mexico and Europe, the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – one of the original Ten, out from prison – stayed in Hollywood, writing under pseudonyms, before finally breaking the blacklist in 1960 when he received a writing-credit for Spartacus.

Trumbo sells itself as a historical biopic. We have sombre intertitles telling us how factual it all is. There’s even real footage from newsreels and contemporary films interwoven. But beside this apparent taste for authenticity is a tonal disingenuousness, and even a kind of ambivalence for the era. The film opens to a fast bebop number, but this is all we hear of the ‘40s; slushy strings soon take over. For a film set in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s – a place and moment for which we’ve so carefully curated our nostalgia – to give us nothing of that feeling, without in any way attempting, as an alternative, to dash these expectations and break through the charade, strikes me as a failure. So Trumbo’s interiors are fine, the shots are fine and make Hollywood look kind of like Hollywood – but they give us no relish of it; the camera has no taste for anything it passes over. The script is deathly flat apart from the rare zingerfrom B-movie exec, Frank King (played by the ever-great John Goodman): “You wanna call me a pinko in the papers? Do it. None of the people that go to my f**king movies can read!” King, operating his studio from what resembles a bowling alley diner, and keeping a baseball bat under his desk, makes a welcome departure from the film’s otherwise stodgy and sentimental realism. He makes you think what the Coen brothers would have done (or did do much better in Barton Fink).

Trumbo simply cannot decide how seriously to take itself. It’s bursting with the mortal significance of its own matter—history—while simultaneously contorting it, showing actor Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) naming names, when in fact he didn’t. ‘Real life’ stories of this variety always play with the facts, but this alteration makes Trumbo’s very basis feel desperately insincere. Helen Mirren makes for a callous Hedda Hopper—the Republican gossip columnist and kind of Katie Hopkins equivalent—and yet she feels like a cheap villain. She and a bullish John Wayne soak up most of the antipathy, as if they alone—mere entertainers—had their hands on the cogs of American paranoia. Bryan Cranston as Trumbo is sassy and likeable, though we see him mostly through incessant type-writing montages, or in boring conversation with his friend (Louis C. K.) who also has lung cancer—just in case history wasn’t interesting enough. The Civil Rights Movement makes it into the background briefly, while the only non-white speaking part is a prison inmate, Virgil (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), convicted of killing a white man. He easily merges with the conglomerate bulk of America that condemns Trumbo, as he’s made a vigorous patriot. The camera would have Trumbo’s downsized suburban house look dingy, as if it weren’t on the cosy side of the Federal Housing Authority and its campaign of nationwide segregation over the course of the 1950’s.

Trumbo is a case of sanitised history; coldly insincere, and infrequently funny. There is not much radical history to be found in the story of Hollywood—the Hollywood communists that there were, failed—and yet what there is, is thoroughly purged from Trumbo and replaced with a saccharine family elegy.