Aaron Sorkin lives and dies by the legal pen. Dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s within his characters’ puffed-up political proceedings or as they finesse through complex legalese is the writer-turned-director’s bread and butter. As a writer, no one can alchemize technical jargon and otherwise boring statistician noise into storytelling gold quite like Sorkin. Within the exhibits of his great successes, nothing towers higher than The Social Network, though dedicated fans of The West Wing would gladly point to that popular and long-standing series as the high watermark of his career.

In films like The Social Network and later Steve Jobs, Sorkin displays a fascination with broken men remaking the world in their imperfect image. His pen guessing at the machinations of generation-defining disrupters, Sorkin imagined how a bad Zuckerberg date led to the decline of democracy or how a cantankerous Jobs was, for all intents and purposes, impossible to be around when he wasn’t hosting an Apple product release. For Sorkin, the estranged relationships of powerful men result in incredible shifting technological tides. So while it makes perfect sense for Sorkin to turn his attention to the disrupting cultural, political forces at the center of The Trial of the Chicago 7, the breadth of the piece is both too broad for him to sink his teeth in as he does when his endeavors are more narrowly focused, particularly when his focus is on one central broken character. Especially so when that character is a bit of a monster.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, as its title obviously alludes to, is an ensemble piece through-and-through. The majority of the film takes place during the titular trial, within a chaotic courtroom as eight (and then seven) men are tried for conspiracy to incite a riot during the Democratic National Convention. There’s Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), and Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). There are also two other defendants who never really journey into the spotlight but forget about them. Their fates tied, their legal battle bound to one another, no one character is centered as the traditional protagonist and Sorkin’s film shares the wealth between them.

With only 130 minutes of screen-time and a thick bench of other supporting characters, The Trial of the Chicago 7 can only do a cursory job of exploring the individual inner workings of these characters. At times, their motivations are dry and thin, escaping the grasp of a feature film that arguably would have worked better as a mini-series. In addition to the eponymous Chicago 7, Sorkin’s script struggles to also cram in a whole host of other players. There’s the plucky defense attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), the morally-uneven chief prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Black Panther activist Fred Hampton (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton), and the blustery, bitter judge Hoffman (Frank Langella). There’s no denying how impressive this cast is but few of them are given all that much to do and it begins to feel like the promise of an all-star cast outweighed the reality of a bloated cast.

We see only the narrowest idea of who some of these characters are, what they believe in, and what they’re fighting for, ultimately making this a film that’s hard to look at and not think that there could have been some easy addition by subtraction. Part of the challenge of adapting this confusing saga of American jurisprudence is the layered complexity of the issue and the impropriety of the courtroom. And though the circus elements of the trail are often front and center, capturing the intricacies that made it so is a bit lost in translation.

To put it bluntly, the trial itself was a disgrace; a national mess where the spur of prejudice was dug in deep and dug in early. The courtroom quickly became an unruly zoo as comedians, beatniks and activists alike clashed with a judge with a preference for vengeance over justice. Though The Trial of the Chicago 7 is able to elicit outrage capturing the chaos of Hoffman’s feral courtroom, it seems as if a more skilled director than Sorkin could have elevated the emotional stakes here, making the film less cold and calculated and more invested in the individual plights of these characters. One scene in particular comes to mind, wherein Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Bobby Seale is taken from the courtroom, beaten, gagged, and brought back before the bench in this diminished state. It’s a shocking moment, yes, and the image of a gagged black man in a “court of law” is provocative as hell but strangely, it’s without the impact that such a scene should elicit.

That’s not to say that Sorkin’s script falls short everywhere. In fact, his sharp-tongued ability to whip the details together into something both concise and legible is admirable, if a touch misdirected. Much like his previous directorial effort Molly’s Game, Sorkin as a director seems to miss the forest for the trees at times, skimping on the emotional center of the character’s arc and failing to deliver the filmmaking flourishes that distinguish a great film as such. The artist efforts of The Trial of the Chicago 7 are largely flat and not worth remarking upon, giving Sorkin’s feature an aesthetic presentation not unlike a prime-time television showcase. Even the cinematography from Phedon Papamichael (Nebraska) feels overly stately and white-collared. And while the performances he gets from his cast are about as decent as they could be based on the text, there isn’t any shining Oscar-worthy role here, despite early prognostications that The Trial of the Chicago 7 might be an Academy Awards powerhouse. Ultimately, there’s just nothing here that’s new or surprising. Nothing that changes the game or displays any interest in such. Sorkin is clearly a master of his craft, but if we are to evaluate his skill set on his first two directorial outings, his craft is obviously behind pen and paper, not a camera.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ showcases both Aaron Sorkin’s great skill and his great shortcomings. Telling the true story of a rambunctious American kangaroo court trial, Sorkin’s script is as precise and laser-honed as one would expect but his developing skill as a director still keeps audiences arm’s reach from the emotional core of the material.