Aaron Sorkin goes back to court in The Tri­al of the Chica­go 7 trailer

A dif­fer­ent time, 1968 – the Unit­ed States had been con­sumed with unrest along lines of polit­i­cal divi­sion, the wide­spread frus­tra­tion man­i­fest­ing in demon­stra­tions begun by left­ist pro­test­ers and esca­lat­ed into street vio­lence by an overzeal­ous police force. On sec­ond thought, the biggest dif­fer­ence between then and now might turn out to be that every­one used to wear flare-leg jeans.

Aaron Sorkin​‘s lat­est direc­to­r­i­al effort dou­ble-under­scores the par­al­lels between the past and present, using a par­tic­u­lar­ly con­tro­ver­sial chap­ter of legal his­to­ry to make his points about civ­il dis­obe­di­ence and free­dom of thought. Decades before any­one had even thought to utter the word ​“antifa,” Amer­i­can cul­ture became con­sumed over the pol­i­tics of rad­i­cal­ism dur­ing The Tri­al of the Chica­go 7.

These men, sev­en activists in pas­sion­ate oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam War and the hege­mon­ic sta­tus quo that pre­cip­i­tat­ed it, brought their anger to the peo­ple dur­ing the 1968 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Chica­go. Rab­ble-rous­ing hip­pie Abbie Hoff­man led the group said by law enforce­ment to have insti­gat­ed the riots that broke out around the polit­i­cal hub, and the fol­low­ing two years saw him and his clos­est asso­ciates put on tri­al for their sub­ver­sive leanings.

One can see the slip­pery, Minor­i­ty-Report-esque slope of think-crime sug­gest­ed by these hear­ings, though Sorkin can be safe­ly relied on to spell that much out for us, as the final sound­bite of ​“give me a moment, friend – I’ve nev­er been on tri­al for my thoughts before” makes clear.

Sacha Baron Cohen leads the cast as Hoff­man, joined by Jere­my Strong as his right-hand man in the Youth Inter­na­tion­al Par­ty, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Pan­thers cofounder Bob­by Seale, Eddie Red­mayne as anti-war speak­er and one-time Jane Fon­da hus­band Tom Hay­den, Frank Lan­gel­la as the judge Julius Hoff­man (no rela­tion to Abbie, of course), Mark Rylance as their lawyer William Kun­stler, and Joseph Gor­don-Levitt as pros­e­cu­tor Richard Schultz.

It’s a per­fect­ly promis­ing cast, but there’s some­thing strange about this trail­er — specif­i­cal­ly, that it’s an unset­tling sign when a pro­mo­tion for an Aaron Sorkin movie restricts itself to a sin­gle line of dia­logue. He’s known for his gift of gab, which will sure­ly get a good work­out in the legal dra­mas he’s made his sig­na­ture, but we don’t get much of a sense for that here. We all just want to see Shake­speare the way it was meant to be played.

The Tri­al of the Chica­go 7 comes to select the­aters in Sep­tem­ber, and then Net­flix world­wide on 16 October.