When television took a stand

(PG cert, 93 min) Anyone who has ever spent much time in America will remember the disbelief and dismay they felt when watching news broadcasts on television. Greaseball male presenters mimic wisdom but end up plain smarmy and stiff, while their female co-hosts coo and defer. Ad breaks constantly interrupt news items, and the world outside the US is often nowhere to be seen.

It would be wrong to be too smug about this. British news broadcasting is hardly in fine shape: the loony mediascapes conjured up over a decade ago by satirists Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris on The Day Today have become appallingly real. Still, it's hard to deny that American news inhabits a shameful league of its own.

Someone embarrassed about this state of affairs is George Clooney . His father was a news anchorman, and he himself studied journalism at university. Good Night, and Good Luck, his second directorial feature after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, is a visually striking and near-flawless account of the battle waged during the early 1950s by one of American journalism's most revered figures, Ed Murrow, against the bullying tactics used by anti-communist senator Joe McCarthy to snout out what he regarded as the "Red menace" threatening the United States.

Although Murrow is beloved by Americans with longer memories, the amnesia-inducing tendencies of today's pop culture means there are fewer and fewer people around who will be able to recall his achievements. These include his This Is London radio broadcasts during the Second World War, the See It Now series on CBS that covered current affairs with rigour and passion, and the Person to Person series in which he interviewed at length the leading entertainers of the day.

Showered with Emmys though these programmes may have been, to most people, not least those outside the US, they mean absolutely nothing today. Clooney and his fellow screenplay writer Grant Heslov could have created a standard biopic. They could have cantered through his triumphant career and issued a worthy, unexceptional tribute to a deserving broadcaster.

Instead, they've decided on a more daring course, one that speaks directly to the political and journalistic conflicts of the present era. Good Night, and Good Luck, its title taken from Murrow's sign-off phrase, is as angry a denunciation of the timidity and banality of what passes for mainstream news journalism as anything to be found in a Noam Chomsky pamphlet.

It begins with Murrow (David Strathairn) giving a keynote speech to TV directors in 1958, in which he destroys the back-slapping, happy-clapping mood of the evening by tearing into the growing commercialism of the broadcast networks and into those execs keener to kow-tow to the corporate rather than the public will. The industry, he says, is "fat, comfortable and complacent", and is being "used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us".

The speech is sensational, pure dynamite, the kind that would normally cap or bookend a movie. Here it's used to spell out straight away the eloquence, moral seriousness and fearlessness in the face of vested interests that defined Murrow's brand of reporting and that had been displayed to most telling effect four years earlier when he and his colleagues at CBS assembled an extraordinarily brave "J'accuse" directed towards Joe McCarthy.

That was a time when the senator ruled supreme, forcing studios to root out any screenwriters, actors and directors who harboured communist sympathies. Reputations were sullied. Performers were blacklisted or went into exile. Some killed themselves. McCarthy, drunk on power, bullied and brayed. He convicted people by association and sometimes on the flimsiest of grounds. When the See It Now team produced a 30-minute, prime-time special in which his methods and motives were held up for closer inspection, all hell broke loose.

Clooney's film takes place almost exclusively in the months leading up to and following this broadcast. It's a remarkably intense work, most of its scenes located in just one or two studio offices where reporters huddle and buzz, desperately trying to rake up incontrovertible evidence that the senator is as twisty and mendacious as they suspect he is. But it rarely feels claustrophobic or clammy. They're as committed, not least to smoking cigarettes, as student-union revolutionaries; they resemble a gang we'd love to join.

At the film's centre is a quite extraordinary performance by the charismatic Strathairn. Best-known for his work with US director John Sayles, here he's a chain-smoking Béla Lugosi-figure with immaculately greased hair and costly cufflinks, a dandy whose mind is as sharp as his trouser creases, a leader whose infectious daring and resolve is offset by a haunted, brooding quality. Not for him the demagoguery of Bill O'Reilly, or the "come on" bullying of Jeremy Paxman; he's as poised and alert as a cobra.

His words are razor-sharp. When he declares, "We should not confuse dissent with disloyalty", it doesn't for a minute sound hokey or pious. Clooney and Heslov's script has a crispness and clarity that has a morality of its own; Murrow's speeches, around three times as long as any we normally get to hear in Hollywood movies these days, are a million miles removed from the canting circumlocutions of today's politicians.

Clooney the actor takes a back seat to Strathairn. But his directing is altogether sharper and more confident than it was in Confessions. The only false notes are the regular cuts to Diana Reeves singing sultry jazz numbers between key scenes, which recall Vonda Shepherd belting away in episodes of Ally McBeal. A sub-plot involving two reporters (Robert Downey Jr and Patricia Clarkson) who, against company rules, are married to each other adds little to the story.

These are minor caveats. Attractively shot in black and white by Robert Elswit, Good Night, and Good Luck is a modestly budgeted film that packs a huge punch and elicited huge cheers from the audience at the screening I attended. Riveting from start to finish, it fulfils its ambitions by convincingly depicting the editorial decisions of a 1950s TV programme as a fight for the soul of post-war America, and thoroughly deserves its six Oscar nominations.

A final irony, one that makes this film's existence all the more necessary: youthful test audiences complained that the actor playing McCarthy was OTT, a drunken boor. It was no actor - just original footage of the man himself.