There's a bitingly funny scene in George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” where Edward R. Murrow — smiter of McCarthyism, paladin of the free press, TV journalist extraordinaire — finds himself tossing celebrity softballs to a zesty young pianist named Liberace.

“Any plans to settle down and get married, Li?” Murrow pokes, his rigid smile betraying the faintest trace of irony.

The interview is a crock, of course, and Murrow knows it. And hates himself for it. And therein lies the conflict that burns beneath the cool, Spartan surface of this timely and rigorous drama.

Ostensibly about Murrow's media duel with notorious Commie-hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the movie more generally is a passionate ode to the pre-infotainment days of TV news, when journalists — and audiences — held themselves to a different standard.

As co-screenwriter and director, Clooney depicts Murrow — played by David Strathairn (“Eight Men Out”) with just the right touch of genial, chain-smoking intensity — as America's Paul Revere in the fight against 1950s political tyranny.

It's Murrow, with the help of confidante and producer Fred Friendly (Clooney), who first takes the military to task for its unfair censuring of an airman with specious “ties” to communism. Trib style It's Murrow who first wounds McCarthy with his beautifully worded “we will not walk in fear of one another” commentary. And it's Murrow who ultimately suffers the rebuke of CBS chairman William Paley (Frank Langella), who haughtily tells his newsman that modern TV viewers just want “to be entertained.”

And how. It's moments like these that elevate “Good Night” to quasi-allegorical status, a “The Crucible” for our troubled national moment.
Narratively, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a model of lean, mean certitude. Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson (“The Station Agent”) play a pair of CBS newsfolk whose secret marriage becomes a sort of half-humored McCarthy metaphor, but that's as cute as Clooney gets.

Via archive footage, the senator plays himself, in a performance that many would brand as overacting if it weren't the chillingly real deal.
“Good Night” is also a shrewd piece of visual direction; Clooney uses the confined, reflective spaces of the television studio to convey the anxiety of TV journalists who feel besieged by their own reporting as they broadcast it across the country. Shot in gorgeous black-and-white, Clooney's love letter to Murrow makes for an experience that's almost as soberly eloquent as the newsman himself.