'Bombshell'

Director Jay Roach wants “Bombshell” to be just another workplace empowerment story, a “9 to 5” for the modern media age, where working women wrestle with the challenge of bringing down a powerful boss who’s sexually abusive.

And if this story were set in most workplaces, that would be that. But the based-on-a-true-story “Bombshell” is set in a specific workplace: The offices of the Fox News Channel. And the boss in question is Roger Ailes, the man who weaponized right-wing propaganda and injected the poison into the body politic. And the women who ended his career, anchors Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly among them, were willing purveyors of that fear-mongering garbage.

“Anything that would scare your grandmother or piss off your grandfather — that’s a Fox story,” a fast-talking Fox producer, Jess Carr (Kate McKinnon) tells a newbie colleague, Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie). For Kayla, a conservative Christian, Fox News is her dream job, and she’s got the blonde hair and good looks to go far there. But to do so, she must please one man: Ailes, played by John Lithgow with a lot of prosthetics and padding.

Kayla is a composite character, in a movie overloaded with name actors playing equally as famous people all over Fox News. That means Kayla is our conduit to see the foul behavior Ailes, who died in 2017 and can’t sue for slander, was accused of doing to many young, ambitious newswomen over the years.

Kayla is one of three legs of the narrative stool Roach, who pulled comedy out of recent history with the political tale “Game Change,” and screenwriter Charles Randolph (“The Big Short”) build. Another is Carlson (Nicole Kidman), depicted as not being willing to put up with the sexism of her “Fox & Friends” colleagues, and fuming when Ailes demotes her to hosting a show in the mid-afternoon dead zone. And the third is Kelly (Charlize Theron), facing a torrent of hostility after challenging then-candidate Donald Trump in a Republican debate — and learning how Ailes’ loyalty has its limits.

When Ailes fires Carlson, and Carlson then sues Ailes — not the company — for sexual harassment, Ailes becomes even more paranoid and dictatorial than usual. That leaves Kayla wondering if her career will be over before it begins, and it leaves Kelly to contemplate whether to support Carlson or stick with Ales.

The crux of the drama focuses on Kelly pondering, like Hamlet, this momentous decision. Theron is a great actor, and her impersonation of Kelly’s clipped cadences is spot on, but no performer alive could make an audience belief that the woman who declared on air that Santa Claus is a white man could be troubled by her conscience.

Roach’s yuk-it-up view of history, though, is less concerned with those kind of nuances. No, broad strokes are the requirement for the actors playing familiar faces. Alanna Ubach’s take on Jeanine Pirro is brutal, as is Allison Janney’s depiction of Ailes lawyer Susan Estrich — but Richard Kind’s portrayal of Rudy Giuliani is a comedy gold mine, whether he intended it to be or not.

Some moments work, like the montage where female Fox stars frantically slip into Spanx and short skirts while telling outside reporters that Ailes doesn’t tell them what to wear on the air. But painting the women of Fox News as the vanguard of the #MeToo movement is a tough sell, one that “Bombshell’s” uneven rhythms ultimately can’t make stick.

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‘Bombshell’

★★

Opened December 13 in select cities; opens Friday, December 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material and language throughout. Running time: 108 minutes.