There's a lot of talk in All the Way, much of it shockingly raw, sometimes blisteringly racist and sexist. That's the point, really. To underline how things were, behind closed doors, and sometimes in public, in the United States in the early 1960s. The more subtle point is to remind viewers that the early 1960s was not all that long ago.
All the Way (Saturday, HBO Canada, 8 p.m.) is an adaptation of Robert Schenkkan's play about Lyndon B. Johnson, with Bryan Cranston in the main role, for which he won a Tony Award two years ago. Cranston is magnificent as LBJ, a loud, shrewd politician, pushing through civil-rights legislation like a punch-drunk fighter determined to stay in the ring and triumph. (The focus is on Johnson's first years in power, not his entire presidency.) It's not a drama with a lot of tension, since everybody knows how LBJ's plan unfolded, but the core attraction is watching this actor as a president who sweet-talked, wheedled and manipulated with extreme force.
It opens tidily, setting the scene and tone. John F. Kennedy has been assassinated and Johnson is trying to get his bearings as president. One of the few things he says in those scenes is to his wife, Lady Bird (Melissa Leo, who is fine but has too little time in the drama), and it telegraphs why LBJ was so driven. "Accidental president is what they'll say," he mutters. And you know from his eyes he doesn't want to be dismissed with that description.
There is little beyond that which puts meat on the bones of the LBJ figure. He talks about a nightmare that haunts him – he's a small boy hiding in a house, "with a Comanche war party searching for me." Later, the idea of LBJ being frightened seems ridiculous. He's a brilliantly calculating politician, telling people what they want to hear, temporarily, in order to get their support and approval. In a meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. (Anthony Mackie) he tells King bluntly that he knows poverty and he remembers, as a child, picking cotton and being in "harness like a mule." King is taken aback and his skepticism about LBJ diminishes just a bit.
Mostly, All the Way is a vigorously colourful depiction of wheeler-dealer politics. It's about LBJ conniving with senators and judges, swearing at many and outright lying to others. He doesn't give a damn. The civil-rights legislation is what matters. He knows it will change everything. He talks about needing to drag the South out of history and into the present. That's a grandiose declaration and he knows it. Meanwhile, though, he has another recalcitrant politician to bargain with and persuade.
The movie is less a study of LBJ the man and president than it is a depiction of politics as practised in the United States. A great deal of it is LBJ going to war against senators Richard Russell (Frank Langella) and Strom Thurmond (Randy Oglesby) and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Stephen Root). Not that it's really war. It's all cajoling and salesmanship.
The interactions between LBJ and Hoover are exceptionally pithy and humorous in a production that has a lot of exposition and arcane talk about getting bills passed through various stages of development. Johnson duly listens to Hoover, who is very obviously obsessed with Martin Luther King Jr. As Hoover makes constant but vague accusations that King is friends with communists, Johnson doesn't roll his eyes; he simply declines to react. Then, when Hoover – Root is excellent in the role – plays recordings of King having sex with various women, Johnson scoffs. A Southern preacher having sex with members of the choir? Well, big damn deal, is Johnson's dismissive, rueful reply.
Hardly anyone apart from LBJ is a fleshed-out character in All the Way. They exist, such figures as King and Thurmond, but they are really just pieces to be moved round the chess board by Johnson. Or shouted at. If there's any sense of shading it's a few powerful suggestions that what Johnson did to the Democratic Party changed it forever, and that he also forced change on Republicans. The Civil Rights Act, the drama suggests, was not just a watershed moment in the history of race relations in the United States. It also shifted politics into the arena that would eventually give rise to the Tea Party.
None of this is done with any great depth. At times, the drama is all too obviously derived from a stage play. But the play and the HBO movie are emphatically about Lyndon Johnson, and what carries it beyond its stagey limitations is Cranston. All the nuance is in his performance. And Cranston does more than inhabit LBJ's Texas folksiness with lip-smacking relish. He also captures the cunning and speed of Johnson's brain, as he shifts, one second to the next, from persuasion to intimidation, from idealist to steely eyed conspirator. It's an astonishing, soaring performance, a reminder of how Cranston took Breaking Bad to a rare level.
Also airing this weekend
Preacher (Sunday, AMC, 10 p.m.) is an adaptation of Garth Ennis's comic-book series, produced by fans of the comics, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. A supernatural drama of often mind-boggling bawdiness, it's aimed at a certain age group with a certain kind of humour. There's been a bit of a fuss about it. And it deserves attention, after more than the pilot episode has aired.
All times ET. Check local listings.