A sanctimonious movie worth seeing for what it exposes about the Holllywood blacklist

Trumbo is a sanctimonious movie on an important theme and, despite its limitations as a dramatic movie, is definitely worth seeing as it exposes some of the horrible things that happened during the Cold War era. We're all familiar with the Hollywood black list, but this movie, as effectively as any I've seen, shows its effect on a individual - in this case a group of screenwriters barred from their profession by the right-wing bullies in Hollywood (Hedda Hopper, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan) and in Washington (RMN, McCarthy, et al). What's special and unique here is the way in which screenwriter Trumbo, after doing time in a federal pen (where there's a good and surprising scene in which has a confrontation with a highly resentful black prisoner - although I wondered what the guy was doing in a fed pen on a murder conviction), begins writing under various pseudonyms and when he actually wins not one Oscar but 2, pseudonymously, he gets to work again under his own name. Most of the Hollywood people depicted are either craven (EG Robinson, various studio heads) or crass - and you can't help but think they were willing to embrace Trumbo once again not because they changed their views but because it would be profitable to do so. Kirk Douglas comes off very well, as does Otto Preminger (one hilarious exchange: OP reads a scene from a screenplay Trumbo is writing for him and says it's brilliant, make sure all the scenes are brilliant. Trumbo says: then the movie would be monotonous. Preminger says, don't worry: I'll direct it unevenly.) The movie is based on a Trumbo bio, and I hope he heeded closely to the facts because that was my main interest here - the dramatic line itself was rather flat and polemical, and Trumbo's relationships with his wife and children never seemed to ring true to me. Dialogue with younger daughter was particularly strained: Am I a communist daddy? Well, what would you do if you had a sandwich and another girl didn't? I'd share! You little Commie! (Would that it were so simple.) Throughout the movie I think Bryan Cranston was over-acting, with a pseudo-British stage accent, as if every utterance were an aphorism for the ages. Then, over the closing credits, there were clips of Trumbo himself, and that's how he spoke - so I have to admit that, annoying tho it may be, Cranston has him dead-on.