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Ben Platt stars as cub reporter Bram in Run This Town, a film inspired by former Toronto mayor Rob Ford's many scandals.Elevation Pictures

“What am I looking at?” asks Bram, the cub reporter played by Ben Platt, at the end of the teaser trailer for Run This Town, the hotly anticipated (in Toronto, at least) film about the late Rob Ford’s assorted scandals.

It’s a good question. The movie, which premiered last March at Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, is 99 minutes long. The trailer, which dropped at 11 a.m. today via the actors’ Twitter feeds, is a mere 83 seconds. But let’s parse it anyway.

It opens with a flat-out homage to All the President’s Men. Bram walks cautiously through a dark parking garage, looking for someone in the shadows. Motion-sensor lights buzz overhead. His phone rings. “I just got here. I’m fine,” he says. And then this: “Mom, Mom, I’ll call you back.”

Still making headlines: A visit to the Toronto set of Rob Ford film Run This Town

Okay, that’s funny. Unlike the real reporters who broke the Ford story, Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan, Bram is a fictional creation. In writer/director Ricky Tollman’s hands, Ford’s crack video is still the Big Get, but it’s also the backdrop to a different story: What happens when ambitious millennials team up with circulation-starved newspaper editors or chaotic politicians, and when white male privilege meets the real world. The fact that Bram’s mommy knows he’s at a sketchy meeting – and that he promises to call her back – tells us a lot.

Good thing it does, because that garage scene takes up 50 seconds. The remaining 33 are all quick cuts of the characters, set to a percussive score. Bram, in a car, looks intent. Ford’s key aide Kamal (Mena Massoud, fresh off Aladdin), slamming down a phone, looks angry. Ford staffer Ashley (Nina Dobrev), asking, “What were you looking for?” looks nervous. Toronto Record editors (Scott Speedman and Jennifer Ehle), sitting at their desks, look skeptical. Ford (Damian Lewis in a fat suit and fuzz cut, looking way too much like Mike Meyers’s Fat Bastard), slumping at his desk, looks overwhelmed.

Then there’s a shot of the clock tower at Old City Hall (BONG), and Bram strides through the newsroom, and reporters crowd Ford as he retreats, and Bram looks at a screen, and Ashley winces at whatever Ford just whispered in her ear, and an envelope changes hands, and a finger presses done on a digital recorder, and an eyeball stares, and a computer file is clicked open, and then the screen goes black, and that’s when Bram asks what he’s looking at.

Obviously we’re looking at a first-time director who wants to make reporting look thrilling. I’m keen to see more.

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