There are degrees of truth. We all hold back certain details of the stories we tell. Maybe those details aren’t important, or they detract from the narrative or cloud the message. Or is that just what we tell ourselves? Maybe we hide those parts because they make the storyteller look bad. Maybe we don’t want to believe they happened at all.

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True Story -- a thought-provoking if dreary exploration of that theme -- is based on the memoir of Michael Finkel, a real-life former New York Times reporter who came to be the confidant of one of the most notorious criminal defendants in America.As the opening titles materialize, a small child sleeps inside an open suitcase, curled up on a pile of clothes. One imagines a preceding scene in which the pajama-wearing toddler -- perhaps protesting her father’s imminent business trip -- throws herself on top of his packed luggage before finally giving in to exhaustion. But that image of snug repose quickly dissolves into horror. A pair of hands zip the suitcase shut as the realization sets in that this precious little girl isn’t sleeping.We next meet two men (Jonah Hill and James Franco) who both introduce themselves as Mike Finkel, reporter for the New York Times. Without the aid of trailers (or reviews like this), it’s difficult to guess which man is really Finkel and which is the imposter.The fake, we learn when the police arrive, is Franco. He plays Christian Longo, a fugitive accused of brutally murdering his wife and children before fleeing to Mexico. On the other side of the continent, the real Finkel finds himself fired from his prestigious job instead of hauling in the Pullitzer he expected, all thanks to fudged reporting in a recent exposé. At first Finkel swears he did nothing wrong. When that fails to sway his bosses, he argues it was unintentional, unavoidable, harmless.In this way the two men are set up as opposite sides of the same coin. Each is accused of something he vehemently denies, possibly even to himself. Whether and to what extent either is culpable is the crux of a character-driven drama that is both admirable and frustrating for its single-minded investigation into what it means to be honest and how difficult it is to give up the lies we embrace.There are only three real characters in True Story: Longo, Finkel and Finkel’s girlfriend, Jill (Felicity Jones). In the hands of theatre director Rupert Goold, the film is an intimate portrait of these three individuals as they chase disparate personal goals against a backdrop of unspeakable horror. To its credit -- and, occasionally to the dismay of the audience -- David Kajganich’s script never allows itself to dip too deeply into the well of sensationalism that might easily drown the human drama of each character's struggle.Though he’s staked a claim as a legitimate dramatic presence in recent years, Hill fails to keep up with his scene partners. He relinquishes the nerdy intensity that earned him his first Oscar nod in Moneyball for an uneven tortured soul routine that fits him about as well as a borrowed suit. Franco has the meatiest role, over which he exerts effortless control, shifting between affable, pitiful and despicable with ease. But it’s Jones who steals the show. Essentially serving as Finkel’s conscience, she proves more than a match for her big name co-stars. She’s given less than half their screen time and spends most it silently fretting over Finkel’s blind quest to restore his reputation. But the few moments when the ordinarily pensive Jill decides to speak her mind really hit home, especially late in the film when she delivers a monologue that utterly destroys the veil of half-truths and codependence Longo and Finkel hide behind.True Story is a somber, brooding, deadly serious film. The atrocities at its heart hang over every scene, allowing no respite for the characters or the audience. While it's interesting to delve into the psyche of the prime suspect in these crimes and his obsessed Boswell, at the end of the day such ponderings are meaningful only in light of the answer to the big question: Did he do it? While True Story does answer that question (for both men), it does so in a dry, emotionless way. This appears to be intentional, as if to say it’s not the sordid details of what really happened that matter but what each man needs the other to believe.