Real life is messy.
It's very rare that the elements for a perfect story, in the Hollywood sense of the word, will actually come together in real life. There usually aren't 'good guys' and 'bad guys', clear-cut Davids and Goliaths, and it's even more unusual for one to score a clean victory over the other. Even in sports, a cauldron seemingly designed to generate these kinds of narratives, the outcome is rarely as simple as good triumphing over evil, because there are real-life personalities and complexities at work.
That's the true triumph of Rush, then, beyond the spectacularly accurate racing sequences — it's a sports movie that doesn't force its well-rounded protagonists into square narrative holes. It would have been so easy for the Frost/Nixon team of director Ron Howard and scripter Peter Morgan to paint James Hunt, the charismatic Brit who was the rock star of '70s Formula One racing, as the hero, and his archrival, curmudgeonly Austrian Niki Lauda, as the villain (particularly because James Hunt is dead, a sure ticket to sainthood).
They don't fall into that trap. Each man — played masterfully by Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl — gets his time in the spotlight, each is sometimes sympathetic, and each is kind of a jerk sometimes. In real life, their pitched battle in the 1976 season didn't end with a fist-pumping, rah-rah, unambiguous victory for either man, and Morgan's script is faithful to that.
After all the flags are waved, Rush doesn't end with a race, but with a philosophical debate, and it's up to you who wins — or if anybody wins at all.
4/5
Rush is in cinemas now.
