'Cover-Up' review: Powerful tribute to Seymour Hersh and investigative journalism itself

WHAT IT'S ABOUT  The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh sits down for the documentary treatment in "Cover-Up" about two decades after its filmmaker, Laura Poitras, first asked him to do so.

"Cover-Up," which the Oscar-winner Poitras codirects with Mark Obenhaus, tells Hersh's story with a focus rooted on the work itself. 

Hersh came to prominence when he broke the story of the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, when U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. Other noteworthy reports include his revelation of the torture of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War, and a multitude of other consequential stories over the decades.

The movie finds Hersh, who is now 88, recounting his reporting on these and other stories, revealing his process and showcasing how investigative journalism works when it's practiced at the highest level.

MY SAY Hersh is a fascinating documentary subject, not just because of his work, but also because he seems thoroughly reluctant to discuss it at all, even as the cameras are rolling. At one point, he tries to quit the movie.

But Poitras knows how to make a movie about a subject like this. She has spent her career telling the stories of the people who blow the whistle on government and corporate secrets, or are otherwise impacted by them. 

She won her Oscar for "Citizenfour," a 2014 documentary about Edward Snowden.

Other subjects have included Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder; Nan Goldin, the photographer and activist who targeted the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma over the opioid crisis; and the U.S. war on terror from the perspective of two men from Yemen.

"Cover-Up" is then the perfect fusion of subject and filmmaker. And that yields a movie that works on multiple levels.

It's compelling in the most basic sense, depicting with tense precision the ways in which Hersh uncovered the My Lai story. Poitras and Obenhaus similarly frame Hersh's recollections of his time working on Watergate reporting for The New York Times, breaking the Abu Ghraib story and more, not as the dry remembrances of a man looking back, but as the stuff of urgent and immediate drama.

It works as a character study, because the filmmakers are not afraid to push their subject past his point of comfort. They're not trying to make him into a saint. They bring up some of his reporting failures. They keep the camera rolling as he decries their inquiries about his sources and as he questions the project as a whole. We come away from the movie with a real understanding of the particular type of Teflon personality one must have to succeed in the business of investigative journalism.

"Cover-Up" is, ultimately, a tribute to that very work, to its critical importance even as it's always under attack by entrenched interests. And as we watch Hersh investigating a new story even today, it's a reminder that the work never stops.

BOTTOM LINE You don't have to be a journalist to appreciate this terrific movie.