Sundance review: 'The Fight' turns the ACLU's legal battles against the Trump administration into pulse-pounding drama

’The Fight’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again: Friday, Jan. 31, noon, Resort (Sundance); Saturday, Feb. 1, 2:30 p.m., Prospector (Park City).

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Watching “The Fight” gave me a brainstorm that any TV producer can have for free: How about a weekly drama series taken from the files of the American Civil Liberties Union. the way Jack Webb cribbed Los Angeles Police reports for “Dragnet”? The drama that comes from saving the Constitution would be spectacular.

The directing team of Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres — the folks who made the 2016 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “Weiner” — get into the New York headquarters of the ACLU, and follow four of the 147 (and counting) lawsuits the group has filed against the Trump administration since 2017.

In one case, a pregnant teen migrant girl in a federal detention center seeks an abortion, which is being denied by the federal government. In another case, lawyers are trying to stop the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border, and get those that have been separated reunited. In a third, lawyers fight a ban on transgender people serving in the military. And in the fourth, a battle against putting a citizenship question into the 2020 census goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

As these attorneys meet the people who are plaintiffs in these cases, the movie provides a look at the real lives being destroyed by policies that are not just constitutionally questionable but cruel and capricious. By following the lawyers arguing these cases, from the hotel rooms where they practice their arguments to trains on which they commute, the filmmakers turn the dusty legal briefs into compelling human drama.