The Program is a 2015 movie, and I had not heard of it during its original release (it was during a period when I didn’t watch many movies or pay attention to them), though as it happened to be a film offered during my long flight from Rome to Calgary, so it made it worth watching for me at least. The fact that this film was worth watching does not mean that I think this film is by any means a perfect one. There is a strange tonal problem in this film that is exemplified by the fact that included among the film’s writers is David Walsh, who also happens to be a character in the drama, and a real-life journalist who was an early critic of Lance Armstrong who believed, long before many did, that Lance had been involved in a serious doping regime (the eponymous program of the movie). Thus this film has two competing tones, one of them is debunking Lance Armstrong as a heroic athlete and courageous cancer survivor and the other is seeking to enshrine journalist David Walsh as a heroic truth teller in a world willing to let people dope because it is a feel good story. I happened to feel that both Armstrong and Walsh were obsessed with their own narratives and their own social power to tell stories and have people believe them, and Walsh seems unaware of what similarities he and Armstrong share on the darker side of their personalities, to the detriment of the balance of this movie.

For a movie about sports, this movie has strangely little to say about the sport of cycling except for the doping involved in it. One thing that the movie–likely due to Walsh’s own myopia as a writer–overlooks is that the film’s accurate contention that cycling is a sport where doping is rampant and where the culture of the sport depends on an omerta-like anti-snitching code that discourages people from revealing the inner workings of its corruption to others does not in any way mitigate the genuine effort and suffering that is required to cycle well. Armstrong, in the film, repeats over and over again to his domestiques that in order for the team to succeed it will not only be necessary to engage in a regimented and disciplined pattern of doping designed to evade rigorous tests but also that it will require digging deep in terms of one’s drive to win and reserves of not only physical but emotional and mental strength. This does not get enough attention in the film. Regardless of the chemical nature of cycling and the behavior of its athletes, the sport requires genuine strength of body and will in order for those doping cyclists to triumph over the course as well as each other and even their own sense of self-doubt.

Despite the obvious limitations of the film’s script and approach, which result from the fact that the film portrays itself as a tell-all of a corrupt athlete, while also portraying a journalist as a noble hero for truth triumphing over the inertia of his colleagues and the caution of his corporate employers, the film is certainly lifted by its acting performances. Ben Foster plays a driven and determined Lance Armstrong whose hunger to win–to win over disease, to win over the skepticism of others that he was a great cyclist, and to crush his opponents in the press and on the Tour de France drove him onward, a performance which would have been benefited even further had the director been willing to explore Armstrong’s own self-perception even further. Chris O’Dowd plays Walsh, a hero (like Armstrong) in his own eyes, whose role is far too large and gives him more or less equal billing, which was a mistake. Among the minor performances, Guillaume Canet is convincing as Dr. Ferrari, whose vision for sports as a field of regimented doping to maximize human achievement is equal parts compelling and horrifying. Denis Menochet plays the loyal Johan Bruyneel, while Jesse Plemons does well as a conflicted Floyd Landis, though far too little attention is paid to other cyclists in general. The film’s limited box office total of some $3 million is an accurate judgment of the limited appeal of self-congratulatory efforts by journalists to the general public, while the film’s positive reviews indicate that film journalists do not see this sort of thing as a negative issue to the same extent that audiences do.