Danny Boyle’s Ink recreates the frenetic birth of The Sun through Jack O’Connell’s performance as editor Larry Lamb, portraying Fleet Street in 1969 as a combustible world of ambition, rivalry and rapidly changing newspaper culture.
The film, which opened the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, follows Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, played by Guy Pearce, as he takes control of the struggling newspaper and recruits Lamb to turn it into a mass-market force.
Adapted by James Graham from his own stage play, Ink charts the pair’s attempt to challenge the conventions of the established British press. Lamb assembles a team of journalists and pushes them towards a publication built around television, sport, celebrity, astrology, sex and human-interest stories.
Boyle’s direction mirrors the paper’s restless energy. The film is fast, loud and packed with abrupt edits, colourful newsroom characters and a soundtrack that gives the crowded offices the atmosphere of a late-night concert rather than a traditional newspaper operation.
O’Connell is the film’s driving presence, presenting Lamb as an ambitious outsider whose hunger for recognition gradually overtakes his remaining reservations. Pearce’s Murdoch is more restrained, but the relationship between the two men gives the story its central tension: one wants to reshape the press, while the other sees an opportunity to rise within it.
One of the film’s most striking moments comes when Lamb and Murdoch stand on Fleet Street and feel the vibration of the printing presses beneath the road. It captures the physical power of an industry that was still driven by machinery, deadlines and the relentless demand for higher circulation.
Danny Boyle’s Ink brings Fleet Street’s newspaper revolution to the screen
Claire Foy co-stars as Jules Davies, a composite character representing the women who worked in the overwhelmingly male world of Fleet Street. Her presence adds another perspective to the newsroom as Lamb’s new team begins testing how far its ideas can be pushed.
The story follows The Sun as it evolves from what Lamb regards as a “laughing stock” into a mass-circulation title capable of overtaking its rivals. Its success is shown as both a feat of commercial instinct and the beginning of a more sensational style of journalism.
That contradiction sits at the heart of Ink. The film is invigorating in its portrayal of a newspaper team discovering how to seize the public’s attention, but it also shows the cost of treating every boundary as something to be crossed.
With its brash presentation and relentless pace, Boyle’s film adopts the very qualities that made its subject so influential. Ink does not simply tell the story of the newspaper revolution on Fleet Street; it attempts to make the audience feel the noise, speed and provocation that powered it.
