The seemingly natural sparkle Anne Hathaway brings to her screen performances looks drained out of her for “The Last Thing He Wanted,” an adaptation of Joan Didion’s 1996 novel. This is apt. Hathaway’s journalist character Elena McMahon is an exemplary Didion heroine: a woman worn down to her last nerve.

Directed by Dee Rees (“Mudbound”), who wrote the screenplay with Marco Villalobos, the movie plunges Elena into the 1980s geopolitical turmoil around the United States’s funding of Contras in Nicaragua. Didion’s novel keeps historical details obscured: The book never mentions Ronald Reagan or his secretary of state, George Shultz. They appear here; Schultz, played by Julian Gamble, is practically a supporting character. Elena’s misadventure motivation is personal: Her ailing father (Willem Dafoe) is himself a gun runner, and she imprudently chooses to carry out his last big score.