I could not help but wonder what Gary Hart must have been thinking in 2016 when he saw Donald Trump win the election for President despite the myriad of things he had done and said about women for years compared to what he did in 1988. Within a few days Hart’s career as a politician was destroyed along with his Presidential campaign. There is no comparison to what Gary Hart did in 1988 to what Trump has said and done for so many years and after he was elected. The only reason why Gary Hart was ruined by his relatively minor one time mistake and Trump was elected is because people view everything about Donald Trump differently and say to themselves, “Oh that’s just Trump, who cares”. Despite all of this, the irony is quite amazing considering all that has happened during the last 2 years, including proof that Trump was having an affair with a porn star. At the end of the movie, it was confirmed that Gary Hart and his wife are still married 30 years after the “Donna Rice, Money Business” scandal and there was some real evidence that the press did in fact treat Gary Hart unfairly.

As far as the movie “Front Runner”, starring Hugh Jackman and directed by Jason Reitman, it plays like a combination of reality show and documentary, so I thought that the quality of the film making was not what I expected for a movie like this. The acting was very good, including Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart and Vera Farmiga as his wife and J.K. Simmons as Hart’s campaign manager.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film is a very average 58% – which is about the same as my opinion, so I give this movie a very marginal recommendation mostly for the history of what happened 30 years ago.