LOS ANGELES – Any doubts that Bryan Cranston belongs on the shortlist of America's greatest living actors are vanquished in an early moment from "All the Way." The HBO biopic chronicles the chaos thrust upon — and generated by — Lyndon Baines Johnson in the period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his own election as president in 1964.
In the scene, the newly minted commander in chief is being tailored for a suit in the Oval Office while talking turkey with Minnesota's Sen. Hubert Humphrey, cracking vulgar jokes with his aides, kissing up to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, cooing over the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., barking orders to his staff and firing a secretary on impulse, insisting her replacement have a "little meat on her bones."
It's a tour de force performance, one that may very well lead to an Emmy to place beside the four Cranston earned for "Breaking Bad." It also has the benefit of being accurate.
"If you asked any of the individuals who worked with Johnson over the years, they would say something like, 'He was the kindest, cruelest, most selfless, selfish son of a bitch, warmhearted, conniving, lying, decent man I ever met,' " said screenwriter Robert Schenkkan, who also wrote the play that bears the same title. "They wouldn't be lying.
Schenkkan and Cranston earned Tonys in 2014 for their stage collaboration, and it would have been as tempting as lifting a beagle by its droopy ears to simply re-create the heralded production.
Instead, with the prompting of director Jay Roach and producer Steven Spielberg, the movie takes full advantage of a more intimate medium, cutting out numerous phone conversations and monologues, while zooming in on emotionally wrenching moments, such as the one in the middle of the Democratic National Convention when a vulnerable LBJ, convinced that the world is plotting against him, curls up in his hotel bed like a child who accidentally saw too much of "Rosemary's Baby."
"Steven said there was an opportunity with the camera to be in these most desperate places with Johnson where there was no hope, those moments of a personal meltdown," said Roach, who had just finished directing Cranston to an Oscar nomination in "Trumbo" before taking on his third film for HBO. "Steven said, 'Commit to those quiet moments. Just make sure they are cinematic.' I thought that was great advice."
Cranston also had to prepare for his close-ups.