September 5

The crew of a live TV broadcast in the 1970s battles mounting pressure and a ticking clock, tensions rising while a well-known outcome is reimagined.

Saturday Night?

No, you’ll find precious few laughs in September 5. But director/co-writer Tim Fehlman and a terrific cast deliver a taut, precise and impressively constructed look inside the crew that found themselves covering terrorism at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany.

Members of the militant group Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine others hostage. You may know how it all ended. And while Spielberg’s 2005 Munich masterfully deconstructed Israel’s plan for revenge, Fehlman (The Colony) puts us beside the souls unexpectedly tasked with broadcasting terrorism to 900 million people.

The news crew was actually from the sports department, and led by legend-in-the-making Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard). After a day covering another Mark Spitz gold medal, gunshots are heard outside. As events quickly grow dire, Arledge rebuffs any requests to step aside for more experienced reporters, leaning on ops director Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) to craft a broadcast plan that won’t impede any rescue effort.

Not one of these 95 minutes feels wasted – a necessity for a film steeped in souls with no time to spare. Fehlman weaves the tech details (Peter Jennings went live via telephone) and real archival footage in an impressively seamless fashion that fuels an authentic urgency that is relentless, apolitical and gripping.

And in a year of some f-ing great ensembles, the one here is right near the top. Sarsgaard, Chaplin and Magaro make an intense triumvirate of smarts, sweat and desperation, while Benesch (The White Ribbon, The Teacher’s Lounge) continues to be a master of understated gravity.

There are so many levels to these tragic hours in history, and Fehlman miraculously packs many of them into close, heartbreaking quarters. A tightly-wound account of one anxious search for the thrill of victory, September 5 is one of the year’s unforgettable thrillers.