How did a liberal Hollywood director end up making a documentary about a conservative Christian politician? The answer, explains The Last Republican’s Adam Kinzinger, is simple: Hot Tub Time Machine.
Steve Pink is, in fact, the director of the John Cusack vehicle about a time-traveling Jacuzzi and its sequel, as well as a co-writer of High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank, none of which would make him an obvious choice to profile Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who effectively ended his political career by voting to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. And that may be why Kinzinger, who hints that he was approached by several other filmmakers, granted Pink access to what turned out to be his final 14 months in office. It’s not a particularly hard-hitting documentary, and despite the broader implications of Kinzinger’s fate, the movie stays narrowly dialed in on its singular subject, his family, and his staff. But the intimacy that spans both sides of the camera, guarded and combative as it sometimes is, ends up being key to extracting a note of hope from a story that could otherwise just be a downbeat cautionary tale.
The Last Republican, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend and is still seeking distribution, frontloads the barbed exchanges between the filmmaker and his subject, who seem to share little in common beyond being born in Illinois. “You have contempt for what I believe,” Kinzinger says to Pink early on, and shortly thereafter he characterizes the director as being “basically a communist.” (“Progressive,” Pink faintly mumbles off-camera.) Although he was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention in August, Kinzinger is no political moderate. He may have thrown his weight behind Kamala Harris in this election cycle, but as he told the Los Angeles Times in Toronto, that’s in part because her approach to foreign policy is more hawkish than Trump’s. Swept into office in the 2010 elections as part of the tea party wave, Kinzinger pushed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to preserve the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortions. So he wasn’t an obvious candidate to break with his party in 2021, when he was one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Trump, and one of two to serve on the Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.
Neither Pink nor Kinzinger seems inclined to dig too deeply into the psychology of why Kinzinger acted the way he did, a subtle affirmation that he’s not the one who needs to have his head examined. Instead, the movie mostly tracks the consequences of his actions, and his disillusion and disbelief with what has become of the political party he once believed in. Kinzinger happily presents himself as a lifelong politics geek, recalling how he turned his childhood bedroom into a mock headquarters for the Bush-Quayle campaign and petitioned passers-by to join the cause, even though the only foot traffic came from his family members.
But his political career began almost by accident, when he was captured on camera disarming a knife-wielding attacker who had slashed his girlfriend’s throat in the street. A military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kinzinger knew how dangerous it was to go up against an armed assailant with nothing but his bare hands, and he’s well aware how easily he could have been killed. But he’s matter-of-fact about why he stepped in. In dangerous situations, he says, 90 percent of people either freeze or flee. He’s the other 10 percent.
The movie’s most affecting sections take Kinzinger through the experience of being abandoned by his party, including the individuals who mentored him as a young congressperson. It’s a story he narrates both in real time and in a retrospective interview conducted in his empty Capitol Hill office, where you can still see the imprint of his legislator’s desk pressed into the carpet. His keenest rage is directed not at Donald Trump but at Kevin McCarthy, who went, in the space of weeks, from criticizing Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election to bending the knee at Mar-a-Lago. In retrospect, Kinzinger sees that brief period, after the Jan. 6 attacks weakened Trump’s legitimacy and before the former president began to reassert his hold on the party, as a crucial missed opportunity, when he and the nine other House Republicans (plus seven in the Senate) who voted to impeach could have established themselves as a vocal new faction and rallied a larger chunk of the Republican Party to their cause. But apart from Liz Cheney, who also served on the Jan. 6 committee and was successfully primaried by a Trump loyalist the year after her appointment, the other eight pro-impeachment voters went quiet, and any hope of a broader movement died on the vine.
Instead, Kinzinger was portrayed as a laughingstock, derisively dubbed a “Pelosi Republican” by McCarthy and mocked by right-wing media for tearing up during his closing speech at the Jan. 6 hearings. (On Fox, Tucker Carlson smirked over a caption that read, “Adam Kinzinger Is Still Crying.”) Over the course of Kinzinger’s final year on the Hill, it’s clear that becoming a pariah in his own party, not to mention the recipient of regular threats to his and his loved ones’ lives, takes a toll on the people around him. At one point, a staffer opens a door in his office to reveal a cabinet stuffed with Kleenex boxes. And of course, the cruelty is the point. It wasn’t enough to disempower Kinzinger; he had to be humiliated, dragged through the mud at every opportunity so no one else would dare to follow his lead. And it worked. Trump believed that Republican politicians were weak, that he could use the power of his followers to bend the party to his will and trash its long-standing ideals—and he has, unequivocally, been proven right.
The fact that one of the few things Adam Kinzinger and Steve Pink can agree on is their mutual love of the original Red Dawn underlines the fact that they’re both members of Generation X, and one way to read the documentary is as a comment on their (and my) generation’s lack of a political footprint. (Even Kamala Harris, for all her love of Prince, is technically a Boomer.) You could argue that Kinzinger chose righteousness over obedience in a way that cost him everything and accomplished next to nothing—or, even worse, that he now serves as an example for any Republican who might so much as entertain the notion of getting out of lockstep with Donald Trump. But there’s optimism in The Last Republican, even if you have to look outside of Kinzinger’s party to find it. Kinzinger and Pink couldn’t seem more different, especially in a polarized political culture where common ground is almost impossible to find. But you can feel them finding common cause, if not spanning the ideological gulf, then at least managing to call out across it. They’ll probably never see eye to eye, but at least they can agree on which movie to watch.
