However, Hart was traipsing around as a family man but refused to let anyone inside his private life. He said we are all explorers, and there was still work to be done. Hart was young enough to bring a sense of vitality that past presidents lacked. He loved to talk about education and how every home should have a computer to help America’s youth in the ever-growing competitive world (ironic since Hart lived in a world where he demanded privacy, yet championed new technology that would make privacy more of an option, almost a thing of the past and always at your fingertips). Young compared to previous US presidents, a forward thinker. Gary Hart was supposed to be the next JFK.

You also wouldn’t know the woman draped on his arm while walking down the street wasn’t his wife. So, chances are, if you saw a man pass you on the street, you would have no idea he might be running for president, and you wouldn’t even know he might be The Front Runner for the Democratic nomination. The internet was just invented in 1983 but didn’t take today’s form of the worldwide web until around 1991, so you couldn’t Google anyone. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter didn’t exist, and those pictures couldn’t be uploaded for everyone to see then share.

If you ran for president in the 1980s, you couldn’t be videotaped or have your picture taken by someone in the street with a smartphone. Much has changed in the last 35 years, so much so that the right to privacy has been directly tied to technological progress. Why has a film that is so focused on driving home the failings of the media come during the current administration’s effort to silence it? Entertaining, uneven, and questionable.

The Front Runner is more about the birth of tabloid political journalism than a docudrama.

Front runner