The Founder

Everybody loves a good rags-to-riches story, right? These days, however, success stories tend to expose a little more of the dark side of making it big - ruthlessness, backstabbing, the casualties left in the wake of someone's rise to fame and fortune.

The Founder, the story of a traveling salesman who slowly but surely transformed a California burger joint called McDonald's into a global fast-food empire, tries to play it both ways, paying tribute to its central character's tenacity and ingenuity while acknowledging his scheming ways. And for the most part, this involving biopic pulls it off, topping its juicy American-dream narrative with a bracing dash of cynical sauce.

Pivotal to its success is Michael Keaton, playing to acting strengths old and new in a role that boldly navigates the grey area where ingratiating, irritating and cold-blooded intersect. It's the 1950s, and Keaton's Ray Kroc is peddling milkshake machines to middle-America restaurants with little success. He's living a life of quiet desperation, ending each day on the road with a glass of whiskey and a motivational speech about the power of persistence on his portable record player. But everything turns around when a small hamburger stand run by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) place an order for eight of Ray's machines. Curious to get a glimpse of a thriving business close up, Ray drives to California and gets the lowdown on the brothers' strategy, which covers everything from their self-designed 'Speedy System' for assembling their food to their strict ideas on quality control.

It's the latter that has kept the brothers from expanding McDonald's from one outlet to many, but Ray is so taken with everything Dick and Mac have created he begs them for a chance to take it nationwide. And he doesn't stop begging until they agree. At first, it's an arrangement that works out well - Ray is determined to make McDonald's happen, partly out of faith, partly out of desperation, and he works day and night to build it up. But as the venture becomes more successful, the more Ray feels he deserves. And he's willing to use means fair and foul to wrest control of McDonald's away from the brothers who created it.

The movie's ambivalent feelings about Ray Kroc are right there in the title - Ray eventually designates himself the 'Founder' of McDonald's when he really simply found it by chance. While The Founder may not explicitly indict Ray for his more callous methods or actions, it gives every indication that his success is built on a shaky foundation. The marvelous work of Offerman and Lynch as men whose idea of value and merit differ dramatically from that of their business partner perfectly illustrates where the movie's sympathies truly lie, but Keaton's uncompromising performance makes Ray more than the villain of the piece. He's the best and worst of capitalist hustle in one package, and The Founder is all the more satisfying for that complexity.