Review: 'September 5' takes a historical moment — the hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympics — and creates harrowing tension like it was happening in front of us

Director Tim Felhbaum’s “September 5” does something quite remarkable — it creates nerve-rattling tension out of a real-life event, one whose outcome is known to many people with living memory of it.

The date is in 1972, the place is Munich, West Germany (yes, still West Germany) — specifically, inside the control room and offices of ABC Sports, which is broadcasting the Summer Olympic Games back to the United States. The boss is the legendary producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), who pioneered the “up close and personal” approach to sports. When one of his assistants wonders if showing a boxing match between an American fighter and a Cuban one is getting political, Arledge replies, “It’s not about politics — it’s about emotion.”

In the floor director’s chair is a rookie, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), subbing for the veteran who’s taking a day off to hike in the Alps. It’s a routine day, everyone thinks, so having Mason in the chair shouldn’t be a problem.

Then the people at ABC Sports hear gunshots.

Quickly, they discover that armed gunmen have made their way into the Olympic Village, where the athletes are living, and have taken the Israeli Olympic team hostage. With some fast reporting, and help from a German translator (Leonie Beseech), the control room learns that the gunmen are Arab terrorists, and that the German cops — more accustomed to traffic control than an armed siege — are out of their depth.

Mason is pressed to make some tough calls, on whether to go live, how to get a camera close to the Village, and how to smuggle film canisters into and out of the police cordon. (This is before the days of digital cameras and wifi.) Meanwhile, Arledge is fighting other battles, like negotiating for satellite time and keeping ABC’s news division from taking the biggest story of the Olympics away from the sports team.

There also are moral quandaries that Mason, Arledge and senior staffer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) try to answer — like whether ABC will show a terrorist killing on live TV, or whether they should be broadcasting the anti-terrorism squad’s actions when the terrorists have TVs and can see everything the control room sees.

Fehlbaum, working of a script he co-wrote with Moritz Binder, digs into the tiny details of making ’70s television, like the plastic lettering used to create onscreen captions. (In one scene, a technician essentially invents, on the fly, the superimposed network logo in the corner of the screen.) He also maintains the reality of what’s happening on TV screens by not dramatizing them — when anchor Jim McKay appears in the monitor, that’s archival footage of McKay, not an actor.

The movie is blessed with a strong acting ensemble, talking in overlapping dialogue that captures the pressures in the control room without getting in the way of the film’s storytelling. In a cast of equals, though, Magaro — recently seen in “Past Lives” and “Showing Up” — gives a quietly powerful performance, showing Mason plunging into a live news event and trying not to show how scared he is of blowing it.

The Munich Olympics happened just over 52 years ago, recently enough that some people remember watching the hostage crisis as it happened. (I was one month from turning 8, and I remember it vividly.) There’s also Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 documentary “One Day in September,” which recounted the events with lucidity and empathy for those taken hostage. The miracle of “September 5” is that even people who watched both of those, and knows the outcome, can get absorbed into the excitement and horror of what unfolds, as if they are hearing about it for the first time.

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‘September 5’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 31, at theaters across Utah. Rated R for language. Running time: 93 minutes.