The Post plunges its audience straight into Richard Nixon’s 1970s America.

Or more accurately, straight into the jungles of Vietnam in 1966, where we meet Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) on patrol.

The film’s heart is years later, when The Washington Post scoops The New York Times after it is silenced by a Whitehouse injunction of the publication of a classified report that reveals four-decades of false justification for the Vietnam War, among other deceptions.

It’s just prior to the President-toppling scandal of Watergate, the Vietnam War rages on amidst heavy opposition and the senseless deaths of American soldiers on foreign soil.

Women, at least in the high-society newspaper and political sphere, remain second-class citizens despite the decade being renown for its social upheaval and the feminist movement.

Newspaper land remains very much a man’s world.

And the film captures the old-style newsroom so well. Right down to the chain-smoking reporters at type writers, the way journos tug impatiently on their belts or adjust their glasses with a free hand, and the sweeping office shots of men leaning on desks and talking about a cracking yarn.

For once it doesn’t feel like I am watching Tom Hanks, who ably plays Post editor Ben Bradlee, with the bravado, cockeyed passion and rolled-up sleeves of every editor I’ve ever worked for.

The movie hones in on the unique relationship between Bradlee and his female publisher, Kay Graham (Meryl Streep).

Graham commands the family’s newspaper business and The Washington Post following her husband’s suicide but the operation is losing money.

As the story plays out, she is in the midst of floating the company on the stock exchange.

We meet her in a business meeting she has prepared endlessly for and she’s insipid, timid and fails to speak up.

The board around her is surrounded by men who don’t believe she is up to the task of managing the business.

Meanwhile, she is incredibly connected with the movers and shakers that pull the strings in Washington. She counts the Secretary of Defence, Bob McNamara, as a close friend.

McNamara, who commissioned the report that is leaked to the press and becomes the Pentagon Papers, is a central figure in the scandal.

So given all this, it takes extreme courage for her to take the stand she does (I won’t spoil the climax even though, you know, history) and the film captures those thrilling hours leading up to that point.

No one really sums up the mettle Graham musters better than the Post editor’s wife, played by Sarah Poulson, during a nice little monologue in the final third of the film.

The cast is really fantastic - Bob Odenkirk is really great as journalist Ben Bagdikian - and Tracy Letts and Bradley Whitford are brilliant as patronising and unfaithful naysayers to Graham’s personal legacy.

I loved the use of giant window frames as a visual device throughout the film. The audience only catches fleeting glimpses of Nixon’s shadowy silhouette as the scandal escalates through the windows of the Oval Office.

Kay Graham is similarly framed by windows, as if they are a cage, in her palatial home as she is bullied and boxed by the men who advise her.

There’s a nice tip-off at the very end of the film concerning a certain, now infamous, break-in.

As a former journo, I love a good behind-the-news story.

The Post is a cracker.