Putting a weird wig on Jesse Plemons is the hair-and-makeup equivalent of putting a hat on a hat.
Plemons (Game Night, Bugonia) can unsettle you simply by standing still. And so there’s no need to emphasize that quality, as Digger does with the weirdo wig it gives him. Plemons has a small part in the movie, as this is predominantly an off-the-wall Tom Cruise vehicle, in which the megastar plays unhinged American oil billionaire “Digger” Rockwell, whose latest drilling venture has unleashed an environmental disaster of global proportions. Yet the way Plemons is handled represents the film’s biggest folly: nearly every costume choice, character detail, joke, musical cue, and political point is turned up to 11 and put on repeat. Imagine Dr. Strangelove directed by Don’t Look Up-era Adam McKay and you’ll have a good sense of Digger.
And yet. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant), from a script by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman, Digger gave me enough to think about to make me glad I endured its maximalist impulses. This was especially the case after a narrative twist and formal inversion about a third of the way into the film. Digger doesn’t let up from this point—we still get far too much screaming satire—but it does open itself to intriguing questions about moral hypocrisy, the role of farce, and how art (even “bad” art like Digger) affords different audiences different experiences depending on who they are, what they’ve been through, and when they encounter it.
What is this twist? (Spoilers ahead.) During a scene in which Digger conducts a private, crisis-management conversation with the physically decrepit president of the United States (John Goodman), the set falls away to reveal that the two men are actors involved in a tech rehearsal for a 25th-anniversary revival of an infamous play called Fossil Fools. The play stridently, comically dramatizes an actual global disaster from decades earlier, depicting the powers that be who were largely responsible as deranged, buffoonish, Strangelove-level clowns.
In deconstructing the fictional Fossil Fools, Digger touches on a number of compelling ideas. Backstage, Cruise’s Curtis Markson—the actor playing Digger Rockwell in the play—expresses uncertainty about his role and questions the value of such broad characterizations. (Even if Cruise, as Digger, literally foams at the mouth in the part, particularly during a soon-to-be-infamous, single-take speech he gives to a United Nations-type assembly lauding the glories of oil.) Plemons’ character (whose identity I won’t reveal) defends the production of Fossil Fools as an important part of the historical record, as well as an avenue for catharsis for audiences who are still living with the environmental fallout of the disaster decades later. During the finale of the play’s preview performance, we see the audience having just such an experience, which the movie caps with a dark joke, preventing Digger from becoming anything close to comforting or inspiring.
More should be said about Cruise, as this is clearly a bid by the four-time Oscar nominee to finally snag the award. The commitment he brings to the extremity of the part is no surprise (nor, for anyone who has seen his cameo in Tropic Thunder, is the willingness to work beneath aging and uglifying prosthetics). Yet despite the intensity, he doesn’t quite have the comic timing to make the strained, farcical scenes work. (Neither does Iñárritu as director.) Cruise’s best moments—beyond that technically impressive oil speech—might be those in which Curtis makes frantic calls to his wife about their adult daughter, whose plane has gone missing. Such scenes are a reminder that although it’s been years since we’ve seen it, what with all the mavericks and missions impossible, Cruise is actually quite good at playing a normal human being.
The only performer who manages the right timing and tone (and keep in mind this is a cast that also includes Sandra Huller and Michael Stuhlbarg) is Riz Ahmed, playing the scientist on Digger’s staff who tries to sound the alarm but is repeatedly ignored. Moving from alarm to panic to indignation to despair over the course of the play within the movie, Ahmed strikes a precise tragicomic tenor that the rest of the material fails to fully convey.
If there is a star of the show, it’s the movie’s production design, led by Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson. The production of Fossil Fools is a multimedia endeavor, so that projected images and cinematic lighting mix with miniatures, matte-painting backgrounds, and multi-dimensional sets. The assembly hall in which Digger gives his speech is as transfixing as Cruise’s performance in it—an ashen theater-in-the-round, down to the clothing and faces of the surrounding diplomats, allowing Digger to pop like a wild west ringmaster in his burgundy suit and cowboy hat.
None of this will likely appease those who feel assaulted by Digger’s overinsistent qualities, from Iñárritu’s ugly, under-the-chin close-ups to Plemons’ wig. Yet for some, this is how Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb initially felt too. It’s worth remembering that Stanley Kubrick’s film—whose satire was no less subtle than Digger’s—was not nearly as universally admired upon its 1964 release as it is today. Critics as far-ranging as Bosley Crowther and Pauline Kael responded with mixed-to-negative reviews, partly because the movie didn’t offer any immediate comfort in the face of the Cold War crises it lampooned. (The L.A. Times’ Philip K. Scheuer called it “an evil thing about an evil thing.”) If we’re on the precipice of global disaster today (and it sure feels like it), Digger also offers little consolation. This is a movie that grabs you by the throat, then sticks in it. The world avoided nuclear war in the 1960s, enabling us to now watch Dr. Strangelove and (sweatily) laugh. For many reasons, I hope we can one day watch Digger and experience the same.
(10/1/2026)
