I can’t say I was excited to settle in and watch “The Last Republican,” Steve Pink’s documentary about former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. No shade to Kinzinger or Pink — it’s just that the past eight or so years have brought on a deluge of documentaries that purport to explain our political moment. I (like you, I suspect) have found them mostly wanting, either too simplistic or too hyperbolic. It’s hard to find one that actually says something you can’t hear on a cable news channel.
Within a couple of minutes, I knew “The Last Republican” (in theaters) would be different. That’s in part because Kinzinger himself is a different kind of subject. He gave a long interview to Pink in what appears to be his mostly emptied office just before he left the House of Representatives. He’d been one of a handful of Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Donald Trump in 2021 (after speaking against his first impeachment in 2019), then served alongside Democrats and fellow Republican Liz Cheney on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Needless to say, he was not popular in his party, especially as other Republicans who had opposed Trump began to change their views. The documentary spends most of its time letting Kinzinger explain why he feels as he feels and did what he did, and why he’d do (most of) it again. In late 2021, he announced he would not run for re-election (a new congressional map had eliminated his district), and a few months later his party voted to censure him. At one point in the movie, the House minority leader at the time, Kevin McCarthy, refers to Kinzinger and Cheney as “Pelosi Republicans.”
Kinzinger reserves his most passionate anger in “The Last Republican” for McCarthy, whom he sees as weak and traitorous for changing his behavior toward Trump. But Kinzinger is as frustrated with his party as he is steadfast in his conservative Christian convictions, pro-military views and socially traditional beliefs. Now, without occupying an elected position, he feels comfortable letting loose.
That turns out to be why the movie works. Pink is on the political left; when Kinzinger half-jokingly dubs him “basically a Communist” near the film’s start, Pink corrects him. “Progressive,” he says, and they carry on. They talk about why Kinzinger chose to allow Pink to follow him and his staff through their final months in Congress, which boils down to a hilarious fact: Pink directed the 2010 comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine,” which Kinzinger declares a “cinematic masterpiece.” There’s clearly some shared sensibility between the two men even if, as they both freely admit, they have no respect for each other’s beliefs.
More than Kinzinger’s story, this is why “The Last Republican” is worth watching. At times it seems like exhortations to “reach across the aisle” and “heal political divisions” have become platitudes, clichés without any firm ideas about how that might be accomplished. But the combative camaraderie that Pink and Kinzinger demonstrate respects both of them as humans — without softening their stances one bit. I hope to see more films like this one in the years to come.
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