Much is made of how Cohn's obsession with Schine was part of his lifelong attraction to buff, square-jawed, Aryan-looking men who stayed young even as Cohn aged. His taste in partners, say witnesses, belied his publicly straight face (nobody could be out during that period of US history anyway) and confirmed his cultural self-loathing (more than one witness describes Cohn as a man who hated his Jewishness and wished to escape it). Stone would later insist to The New Yorker, "Roy was not gay. He just liked having sex with men." It's in discussions of Cohn's refusal to identify as a gay man that the film manifests something like empathy, pointing out the unrelenting homophobia that kept men of Cohn's generation in the closet. (At the Army-McCarthy hearings, politicians who resented McCarthy and Cohn struck back by directing homophobic remarks at Cohn on camera.) 

But this impulse to humanize Cohn only goes so far, because Cohn wasn't merely hard to like; he seemed to relish being publicly hated, and treated the loathing of others as emotional fuel. After Cohn's hubris inadvertently helped neutralize McCarthy and drove Cohn from Washington, he returned to New York and embraced his heel status, celebrating himself as a ruthless individual who seemed proud of his reputation for manipulation and viciousness. The litany of outrages packed into this movie's brief running time would seem unbelievable if they weren't true: they included running the Lionel Train company into the ground, possibly killing a young man in a yacht fire that was meant to collect insurance money, and getting disbarred for lying on a bar application, stealing clients' funds, and pressuring a client to change a will. Even Cohn's own demonstrable suffering in the closet doesn't mitigate such behavior: as McCarthy's right hand, he was responsible for the persecution and firing of other gay men whose sexual orientation was weaponized against them, to tar them as security risks.

But in his mind, Cohn was still the hero of his own story. And we get the impression from this film that, right up to the bitter, agonized end, he was engaged in an internal battle to justify himself to himself, and to the world. Kushner's play explained Cohn's brand of self-loathing better than Cohn ever managed to. "Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men," the character of Cohn insists to his doctor, Henry. "Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can't get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?"

Header photo by Sonia Moskowitz.

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