“A Blast from the Past”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

The Company You Keep is based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Neil Gordon; Robert Redford produced, directed, and stars in it; and it is about an anti-war protester from the Seventies who has been underground all this time, but is now being chased by the FBI for a murder that occurred in a bank robbery that went bad.

The Company You Keep

This is somewhat ironic, because the protester, Nick Sloan, was a member of the Weather Underground, also known as Weathermen, who used bombs to draw attention to their cause, which was an anti-Establishment protest against the war in Vietnam.

The story erupts into motion when a woman who was also a part of the movement is captured by the FBI, and a young newspaper reporter, played by Shia LaBeouf, starts digging into the details of her arrest and discovers a link between her and a lawyer named Jim Grant, who lives in the area.

The reporter’s editor tells him, “You keep telling me you’re a good reporter, right? Prove it.”

After more digging into Grant’s background and the details of the bank robbery in Detroit, the reporter believes that Grant is actually Nick Sloan, whom the FBI has been looking for since the Seventies and making them look bad, because they could never catch him.

The reporter’s suspicions prove to be true, and after Sloan gets his brother to take care of Sloan’s daughter, who is 11 years old, Sloan takes off across country with both the FBI and the reporter after him.

Although the FBI believes that Sloan is just running to escape capture, the reporter thinks that Sloan has something else in mind, and the reporter is right.

Sloan is searching for Mimi Lurie, another protester from back in the day, and he is looking up other colleagues who might be able to help him find Mimi, because Sloan believes that her help is the only way that he can get his daughter back.

The people that Sloan gets in touch with are all played by famous actors, so many, in fact, that their appearance can become distracting.

The Company You Keep is a look back at a time when the whole country was in turmoil and a protest group believed idealistically that what they were doing was right, a blast from the past.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”