Director Oliver Stone takes on the controversial Edward Snowden in his latest film; the man famous for leaking NSA documents regarding the United States surveillance of its own citizens in 2013.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Snowden with an internalized performance that mimics his monotone a bit too closely. We meet him in a Hotel in Hong Kong with documentarian Laura Poitras in the week he releases the information to the press. Using the the real-life doc Citizenfour as a framing device both makes the film feel less immediate and unfortunately makes us question why a biopic is necessary so soon after the fact. From there we a taken to the beginning of his career in 2004.

Snowden begins as a student at the CIA, meeting two mentors and possible fates; Rhys Ifans as a morally plastic but staunch government suit, and Nicholas Cage as a former wunderkind who rocked the boat and was sent to the basement to teach. Throughout Snowden’s career he meet a spectrum of spies, played by a deep bench of actors (Timothy Olyphant, Lakeith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, and more). They pull him in both directions while seeds of doubt are planted by the corrupt and moral alike.

Snowden’s girlfriend, played by Shailene Woodley, alternates between a carefree spirit and a nagging presence in his life. Stone gives her little to do but their relationship is where we witness Snowden’s inner-conflict play out. He gets a new job, becomes disillusioned, they fight, they move, and the cycle is repeated. The repetitive nature of this story made me think that the details of his personal life should have been put aside to make room for more commentary on our government. The man himself has said that he didn’t want to be the story after the leak. Nevertheless, I was compelled.

Finally, Snowden arrives at the last base he will work at before he spills the beans. It’s a place where every team must keep their secret operations from each other, all while working in glass cubicles in the same concrete war-room. Cinematic? Yes. Realistic? No. It’s the sort of Oliver Stone heightened reality I would be on board with if the rest of the film wasn’t so restrained. Thankfully, there are few flourishes that enter the self-parody I feared from the trailers; namely smuggling out data in the Rubik’s cube and representing the internet as a CGI cosmos. This material isn’t suited for the conspiracy-myth approach a la JFK. Edward Snowden is a buttoned-down computer whiz with few vices and the film matches the man.

We still live in a world of bloody ground wars, the kind explored by Stone in Salvador and Platoon. But the larger, longer fight is in the digital realm. Snowden is about that sober departure from the frenzy of battle to the multi-faceted Cold Cyber War. Stone is not losing his edge, he is adapting his charged rhetoric for our new world order.