Mank, which takes up the
Citizen Kane authorship question reinvigorated by a 1971 Pauline Kael essay in
The
New Yorker. "What was of interest to me was, here's a guy who had seemingly nothing but contempt for what he did for a living. And, on almost his way out the door, having burned most of the bridges that he could … something changed."
Shot in black and white and in the style of a 1930s movie,
Mank toggles between Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) writing the first draft of
Citizen Kane from a remote house in the desert and flashback sequences of his life in Hollywood in the '30s, including his friendship with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), who inspired