I liked and respected the Broadway stage version of All The Way, but it didn’t knock me flat on my back. The trailer for Jay Roach’s HBO adaptation (debuting on 5.21), in which Bryan Cranston again plays Lyndon Johnson during his greatest historical hour, suggests it might be a bit more finessed and therefore a tad more engrossing. Some things work better when they don’t have be broadly performed and more or less shouted from a stage. Costarring Anthony Mackie (Martin Luther King), Melissa Leo (Lady Bird Johnson), Bradley Whitford (Hubert Humphrey), Stephen Root (J. Edgar Hoover), Todd Weeks (Walter Jenkins), Mo McRae (Stokely Carmichael), Spencer Garrett (Walter Reuther) and Frank Langella (Sen. Richard Russell).
