Great art speaks truth to power: Shakespeare’s King Lear, Picasso’s Guernica, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It provokes, it challenges, it implores change. In our time of global uncertainty and upheaval, one film has attempted to take on that mantle without fear of consequence. Nine Lives, a film about an absent father (Kevin Spacey) who is turned into a cat by a magical pet shopkeeper (Christopher Walken), is currently on 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a certifiable box office flop. And it is the most important movie of the Trump era.

The key to understanding Nine Lives is throwing out everything you think you know about film. I admit, the trailer has all the hallmarks of a bad children’s movie – the cheesy voiceover, the record scratch moment, the prerequisite scatological humour where Kevin Spacey urinates in his ex-wife’s handbag, and the wordplay. The tedious, tedious wordplay. At one point a character is asked “Do they make MRIs for cats?”, and he replies – his eyes dead, dreading the inevitability of the pun he knows he has to make – “you mean cat scans?”

Except this is not a children’s movie. At all. And I don’t just mean that in the sense that it goes to very dark places (divorce, families having to decide whether to take their vegetative relatives off life support, one character attempting suicide – this all happens). There are large chunks of the movie that no child could find interesting. Conversations about New York real estate. Corporate business structure. Several (I mean several) scenes about how the company board votes for its CEO.

Jack Bernhardt (@jackbern23) And it's stuff that no child could possibly find interesting. Here's honest-to-God an actual scene from the first 20 minutes. pic.twitter.com/4dZZMAtJdF

Imagine you’re a child and you’ve been told you’re going to see a film about a talking cat. Imagine then sitting through 10 minutes of five old white men talking about whether or not they’re going to sell their company. It’s like being told you’re going to Disneyland and then being made to sit through four hours of presentations of market projections to Disney shareholders.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Don’t scoff when you flick past Nine Lives on Netflix.’ Photograph: Takashi Seida/PR

But what if this isn’t a case of the film-makers failing to understand their audience. What if this is all very intentional.

If you want to look at who a film is for, look at its protagonist – in this case, Spacey (even if he doesn’t want to be). Spacey plays New York billionaire Tom Brand, head of “Firebrand”, a massive company that specialises in real estate and golfing supplies, who is trying to build the biggest skyscraper in North America (why? Because biggest skyscraper in North America, that’s why) with the help of his sycophantic, loser son.

Jack Bernhardt (@jackbern23) Billionaire with a giant New York skyscraper whose name is his personal brand, who mixes family and business.



You see where I'm going. pic.twitter.com/laxVMsHlAL

This isn’t too extraordinary – a lot of films have used Trump-a-likes as a bad guy. But here’s the remarkable thing about Nine Lives – the Donald Trump character isn’t the bad guy. He’s the hero.

If you were writing this film to make him the bad guy, for instance, you would want him to come across as a curmudgeonly old man who only cares about money. You wouldn’t make it so that his first scene involved him skydiving out of a plane like an Absolute Boss. You wouldn’t make it so that he tells terrible jokes that everyone absolutely loves.

Jack Bernhardt (@jackbern23) People LOVE Kevin Spacey's Dickhead Character in this universe. Here's a lame joke he tells.

LOOK HOW MUCH EVERYONE LOVES IT. pic.twitter.com/Ek7isQzqPL

So is this just a sycophantic pro-Trump film? No. Because over the course of the movie, Brand, as Mr Fuzzypants the cat, understands what he was missing out on when he was at work negotiating boring, boring business deals. He plays games with his child and realises he should have been a better dad. He watches his wife sleep, in a scene that I’m pretty sure I’m still very uncomfortable about, and realises he should have been a better husband. When he (spoiler alert) eventually returns to Spacey’s body, he understands that he allowed work to dominate his life. He takes a back seat from the company and enjoys himself instead.

Nine Lives review: Kevin Spacey can't claw his way out of this feline disaster Read more

And that’s the key. Nine Lives isn’t a film about Trump. It’s a film to him. He is the entirety of the target audience. This isn’t really a film at all – it is a message to the most powerful man in the world, begging him to change his ways. It doesn’t do so with anger – it coaxes with the things that will appeal to him, like jokes about skyscraper regulations, ex-wives and awesome skydiving billionaires that everyone inexplicably loves.

Nine Lives could become the start of a new wave of cinema: films that are written solely to change the mind of Trump. Imagine what Nine Lives 2 could do – Spacey is turned into a cat and the only way to change back is to learn about the intrinsic inequality of the American healthcare system. Nine Lives 3? Spacey is turned into a cat and will only be changed back when he understands the folly of brinkmanship with North Korea. Nine Lives 4? Spacey is turned into a cat and then has to release his tax returns (which, to be fair, as a cat would be both difficult and adorable).

So don’t scoff when you flick past Nine Lives on Netflix. Recognise it for what it is – an attempt to change the course of humanity, to appeal to one man’s better self. Because if that one man were to watch it, maybe, just maybe, the world could avoid a nuclear – and I write this with my eyes dead, dreading the inevitability of the pun I know I have to make – catastrophe.