Anti-Trump movie The Last Republican finds a surprising source of hope.

How did a liberal Hollywood director end up making a documentary about a conservative Christian politician? Steve Pink is, in fact, the director of the John Cusack vehicle about a time-traveling Jacuzzi and its sequel, as well as a co-writer of High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank, none of which would make him an obvious choice to profile Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who effectively ended his political career by voting to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. In retrospect, Kinzinger sees that brief period, after the Jan. 6 attacks weakened Trump’s legitimacy and before the former president began to reassert his hold on the party, as a crucial missed opportunity, when he and the nine other House Republicans who voted to impeach could have established themselves as a vocal new faction and rallied a larger chunk of the Republican Party to their cause. The fact that one of the few things Adam Kinzinger and Steve Pink can agree on is their mutual love of the original Red Dawn underlines the fact that they’re both members of Generation X, and one way to read the documentary is as a comment on their generation’s lack of a political footprint. But there’s optimism in The Last Republican, even if you have to look outside of Kinzinger’s party to find it.