As a French auteur with international pedigree, Olivier Assayas likes to split his time between intimate homegrown dramas and kinetic thrillers that never stay in the same place for too long. On one side, there are the director’s very Gallic works like Late August, Early September, Summer Hours, Non-Fiction and recent COVID comedy Suspended Time. And on the other there are English-language flicks like Boarding Gate, Demonlover, Personal Shopper and Wasp Network that are constantly in movement, hopping between continents, cities and multiple genres (suspense, horror, espionage, etc.).

The writer-director’s sprawling new feature, The Wizard of the Kremlin, clearly falls into the latter category, chronicling three decades of life in post-Soviet Russia that saw the rise, and further rise, of Vladimir Putin to supreme leader of the land (or “tsar,” as he’s referred to by everyone). The film is filled to the brim with real people and incidents, providing an entertaining primer to explain how a former Communist country was transformed into a cutthroat capitalist regime ruled by an authoritarian modeling himself on Stalin.

Assayas’ movie coasts swiftly along, from the fall of the U.S.S.R in the late 1980s to the 2014 invasion of Crimea, with the director applying a fluid, unfussy style as he leaps between offices, hotels, mansions, forests, and streets in Moscow, London and other capitals. But things tend to get muddled whenever he slows down and tries to create real drama or memorable characters, at which point The Wizard of the Kremlin feels clunky and expository, as if the actors were reciting lines from the totalitarian’s playbook.

The script (written by Assayas and novelist Emmanuel Carrère, who appears in a small cameo) is based on French-Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling novel from 2022, which was itself based on years of research and didn’t fictionalize all that much except for its main character — the titular “wizard” inspired by Putin’s former right-hand man and spin doctor, Vladislav Surkov. Here he’s been renamed Vadim (or Vlad) Baranov and is played by Paul Dano in the actor’s charmingly offhand and cerebral manner.

Dano very much anchors the film, even if his character remains something of a cypher, and not necessarily a likable one, throughout the story. We first meet him when an American professor (Jeffrey Wright) is summoned to his massive estate outside Moscow. The two exchange a few pleasantries, including about their favorite writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1921 dystopian novel, We, famously inspired Orwell’s 1984. Afterwards, Vlad sits down and begins to tell his tale, which lasts for the next two-and-a-half hours.

The framing device feels a bit contrived, but the scenes between Dano and Wright are good enough to keep us interested. The rest of the action follows Baranov in flashback as he goes from punkish theater director at the tail end of the Soviet era to profiteer during the chaotic reign of a drunken Boris Yeltsin, until he becomes a successful reality TV producer during a ‘90s economic boom that saw the rise of Russia’s oligarch class. One of them — the real Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) — takes Baranov under his wing to help orchestrate the path to power of Putin (Jude Law), a cold, crafty and not-very-marketable former spy who was appointed by Yeltsin to run the FSB (ex-KGB) in 1998.

If you just flinched while reading the name Jude Law, it’s certainly jarring when he first appears as Russia’s future dictator (is there another word for it?) and warmonger, not to mention a world leader committing crimes against humanity that are still happening right now. Lots of people love Law; far fewer love Putin. But the actor slips into the role flawlessly (with the help of good makeup), never overdoing it and adding a fair amount of gravitas to the constantly shifting scenery. Assayas’ film gains momentum whenever he’s on screen, and thus loses steam when Putin disappears for much of the third act.  

The plot also gets bogged down in too many characters and events, which may be pivotal to explaining recent Russian history but not necessarily suitable to a gripping narrative. Assayas wants to pack everything and everyone in — from the Chechen War to the Moscow terrorist attacks to the Sochi Olympics, from dissident poet and politician Edouard Liminov (Magne-Havard Brekke) to Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin (Andris Keiss), casting lookalikes to play those brief parts.

The Wizard of the Kremlin can feel like a six-hour miniseries screened at 1.5x speed, so much does it zip around to try and tell the full story. And it’s clearly an incredible story, revealing how Baranov used his savvy media skills to create the myth of Vladimir Putin, doping the public into propping up a seemingly modest man who turned into a tyrant. Many of the oligarchs backed Putin’s rise, and those who eventually turned on him didn’t end well. (For those unfamiliar with Berezovsky’s fate, it features prominently in the last act.)   

The rise of an authoritarian via a ruthless manipulator recalls last year’s Donald Trump portrait The Apprentice in more ways than one, although that film smartly limited its scope to two major players and time periods. Assayas’ movie is far more comprehensive but winds up overextending itself. In its closing reels, it casts aside the historical record for an invented domestic drama about Baranov’s love affair with on-and-off girlfriend Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), who’s attracted to powerful men (including fictional oligarch Dimitry Sidorov, played by Tom Sturridge), though cherishes her own freedom (and yachts and jewelry). Compared to Putin’s attempts at world domination, this feels like trite stuff.

But perhaps the main problem is that we really don’t get to know Baranov intimately, even if he narrates the story and appears in nearly every scene. Both by choice and design, he remains a man in the shadows, which means we don’t exactly care about his emotional squabbles, nor about what happens to him in the film’s shock finale.

Neither Baranov nor Putin — nor the many oligarchs, whether dead or alive — are the protagonists of The Wizard of the Kremlin, whose main character is ultimately Russia itself. In that sense, Assayas has crafted an ambitious chronicle that serves up plenty of compelling facts, but never turns them into the stuff of legend.