The Younger Brother Lacks Context in ‘RFK’

Americans often watch television indiscriminately, because it’s available and the price is right. So one measure of a TV movie is whether anyone would pay to watch it in a theater.

As for “RFK,” unlikely.

It’s from FX, a Fox cable network whose belated drift toward brawnier topics is affirmed by its coming movie “The Pentagon Papers” as well as by this middlebrow biography spanning the final five years of Robert F. Kennedy’s life.

Watchable it is; profound it isn’t.

“RFK” opens with the Dallas assassination of Bobby’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, whom he had served controversially as attorney general, politics being the family business.

It ends when RFK is gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles, on June 4, 1968, right after winning the California presidential primary and just two months after he had mounted a stage in Indianapolis to tell a throng, largely African American, that Martin Luther King Jr. had been slain in Memphis. It was that kind of horrific year.

Noted in this story, directed by Robert Dornhelm, are RFK’s seminal political decisions during this period. He lands in New York and campaigns victoriously for the U.S. Senate.

After much anguish, he outrages JFK’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, by publicly denouncing the bitterly divisive Vietnam folly that his brother led the nation into (with his own amen, by the way). Finally, he goes for the Democratic presidential nomination against increasingly unpopular LBJ, whose Great Society agenda had become one of the war’s casualties.

Bobby was a lightning rod even within his own party. He’s mostly sympathetic here, but no saint and ever complex while trying to live up to JFK’s romanticized legacy.

Linus Roache (another Brit cast as an American) plays Bobby credibly. He’s witty, he’s nasty, he’s sad, tapping the sorrow in that distinctive voice without mimicking him. James Cromwell, however, offers little beyond one-dimensional menace as LBJ.

Nor is there context here for his mutual animosity with Bobby. Or the kind of texture that would give a truer sense of these times.

“RFK” is most effective, and highly arresting, when Hank Steinberg’s script has Bobby and the dead JFK (Martin Donovan) engage in emotional dialogues. This device has the younger brother’s feelings of guilt and self-doubt spilling out with great flourish.

Yet missing even here are greater truths about Bobby, who was associated with America’s robust idealism of the early ‘60s and who might have loomed large in national politics for years to come had he lived.

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“RFK” will be shown Sunday at 8 and 10 p.m. on FX. The movie has been rated TV-PG (may not be suitable for younger children).