The witch hunt conducted against writers, actors and others working in the Hollywood in the 1950s is one that needs to be told. It is only surprising that it is Jay Loach, best known for the defiantly lightweight Austin Powers movies and Meet the Parents, who has taken up the challenge for the modern audience.

Trumbo centres on Dalton Trumbo, one of the top screen writers of the time and a member of the communist party. With 'reds under the bed' anxieties at a fever pitch in the USA, he is one of a number of writers targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The result is a show trial (displaying shades of Stalinist Russia and plenty of regimes around the world since). Trumbo refused to 'confess' or to co-operate and so, like a number of his colleagues, was imprisoned for eleven months. On his release he found himself blacklisted by all the studios. Bryan Cranston gives a fine, if sometimes overegged performance as the screenwriter, forced to make a living writing scripts under assumed names. Some were cheap and cheerful and others famously successful and were only much later credited to him (Roman Holiday and The Brave One both won Oscars).

The film sometimes strays dangerously close to parody. Helen Mirren (dare I say it?) overplays the dreadful columnist Hedda Hopper with arch glee and an eye-catching collection of outfits. John Goodman does his usual larger than life thing as the studio boss Frank King, wielding a baseball bat with ferocious delight when an unwelcome visitor comes calling. More measured performances come from Diane Lane, holding the family together in the Trumbo household, and Louis CK as Arlen Hird, a fellow screen-writer and friend struggling with illness and Trumbo's dogmatism.

All in all, Trumbo is well worth seeing. Entertainingly slick, intermittently funny, it tells a significant story about the importance of artistic freedom. Through news clips from the time, it hints at the paranoia which gripped American society in those years, but by focusing on Trumbo it skates over the truth that for others, both inside the Hollywood and beyond, it led to ruination from which there was no happy ending.