Brexit: The Uncivil War review – Benedict Cumberbatch is better than feared in drama that more than justifies itself

When, last month, a US trailer for Channel 4’s one-off film about the 2016 EU referendum appeared on Twitter, it was itself swept into the Brexit narrative – and by “narrative”, of course, I mean “tornado of febrile rage”. Despite its pedigree – the first scripted drama commission by ex-Newsnight editor Ian Katz in his new role as Channel 4’s director of programmes, it has been written by political playwright du jour James Graham – it was met with opprobrium. While some claimed it was glorifying its dubious protagonists, others complained it was interfering in continuing investigations into the legality of the Leave campaigns. Graham said, as politely as possible, “wait and see”.

So now I have seen more than 30 seconds of Brexit: The Uncivil War, what of it? No doubt some will disagree, but I think it more than justifies itself. Its value, for those who have not had their heads buried in the political news pages over the past two years, is to illuminate the relatively anonymous players who pulled the strings in the torrid campaigning battle. Chief among them is Vote Leave director and mastermind Dominic Cummings, as played by that national acting icon Benedict Cumberbatch.

Despite what some feared, the casting of Cumberbatch doesn’t simply flatter Cummings – the A-lister is too good a chameleon for that. But, inevitably, as he scrawls out his campaigning brainwaves on a whiteboard, there is a touch of that deductive maverick Sherlock in his portrayal of this scruffy, balding political saboteur.

Equally, though, as Graham himself suggested at the press screening, Cummings recalls Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network: a scornful, socially awkward man, driven to disrupt the world but without anything approaching a moral purpose. Cumberbatch, it has to be said, is completely compelling, his mercurial charisma coloured with misanthropic despair. When the Leave win is announced, he breaks the fourth wall with an apprehensive glance to camera that suggests a man only finally considering the monster he has unleashed.

In fact, the ultimate story here is not really Leave vs Remain, though that race is covered grippingly, like a thriller, with the former camp’s fantastical exploitation of disaffection and xenophobia set off by the latter’s misguided belief in “the facts”. It is a more universal face-off: that between the new technocracy, as represented by Cummings and his data-mining chums at shadowy organisation AggregateIQ, and the old political establishment, whether that be the dinosaur Eurosceptic MPs or Rory Kinnear’s harried Remain campaign director Craig Oliver.

The Leave side’s heavy deployment of micro-targeted online adverts, and their related use of people’s personal data, not to mention overspending (the latter unmentioned here), is a subject that continues to face journalistic and legal scrutiny. But, criminal or not, no one could surely come away from this drama seeing such an operation as anything other than a malign new path for our democracy.

It’s not perfect, of course – for how could any aspiring explanation of such monumental wrongness be that? Notably, the characterisation is less assured when it comes to more famous supporting players. From Boris, with his Party Warehouse wig and too youthful demeanour, to that gruesome twosome Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, they’re familiar, student-revue caricatures. And yes, cartoons is what they may purport to be in real life, but to continually portray them as such only plays into their hands.

That aside, what Graham has produced is an engrossing second draft of history, one that amid all the continuing mayhem offers some kind of manageable perspective on a raging nation governed by charlatans and manipulated by algorithms. The whole thing is summed up by the soundtrack’s eerie, cacophonous take on Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory”. Make that our new national anthem, I say, as the ugliness drones on.