“The American people want someone to articulate their rage for them,” the manically motivated television director of programming Diane Christensen, pitched perfectly in the key of shrill by Faye Dunaway, tells her staff in “Network,” the 1976 film that took satire to a new and prophetic level in American filmmaking.

Who knew it would turn out to be a terrifying glimpse into a future of paranoia, rage and the power of a fourth network to not only sway public opinion but blur — or perhaps obliterate — the line between truth and fiction.

Forty-two years later, “Network” is on Broadway as a play at a time where that very sentence — and dozens of others from Paddy Chayefsky’s not-a-word-wasted screenplay — are almost jaw-dropping in their relevancy to today’s fractured and embittered America.

And as the director Ivo van Hove’s new stage version proves, the power of “Network” is its portrayal of how the public feeds on the promise of a savior — even an angry one. The rage that pours out of Howard Beale, the film’s fallen angel of a newsman who is pushed out of his anchor chair only to become a voice box for the fed-up average Joe and Jane, was a rare public display on a fictitious TV network that felt all too real. But in the waning days of 2018, public airing of rage is a minute-by-minute spew-fest on Twitter or your choice of the social media du jour. Somehow “Network” feels almost touchy-feely nostalgic.