KJ Apa spent years on Riverdale doing a reasonable impression of teen-next-door sincerity while getting upstaged by everyone around him. The surprising thing about Jimmy is that he's found a role where the upstaging problem runs in reverse — and he's good enough in it to make you angry at the film he's been dropped into. The movie covers Stewart's decision to enlist despite MGM's interference, his service as a bomber pilot and squadron commander, his accumulated PTSD, and his eventual return to Hollywood and the making of It's a Wonderful Life. That's a defensible slice of a long life. The problem isn't the selection; it's that director Aaron Burns and screenwriter Justin Strawhand have decided the only interesting thing about any of it is the thematic neatness: war trauma → Capra film → hope restored. Everything else gets subordinated or dropped. Apa captures Stewart's specific physical texture — the gangly quality, the voice that sounds like it might overflow before it finds the words, the way distress moves through his whole body. It's not a perfect recreation, and it's not surprising in any formally ambitious sense, but it's genuinely inhabiting, which is more than most star-impression biopics manage. That the film around him is so diagram-heavy makes it actively frustrating. When Stewart's men need a morale boost, he delivers a speech. When Mayer needs to explain the thematic stakes, he delivers a speech. When Capra needs to explain what the movie is about, he delivers a speech. Nothing is allowed to emerge. Max Casella plays Frank Capra with Joe Pesci energy, which is a genuinely strange choice for a man best known for sentimental small-town Americana — but the film doesn't interrogate the contradiction, it just casts for scenery. Jason Alexander's Louis B. Mayer exists to voice the film's thesis at regular intervals, most bluntly in "I can't sell hope right now, Jimmy, not with you." That line isn't just on the nose — it's the film telling you what it's about and then handing you the answer key. The battle sequences, which should be doing the work of seeding Stewart's later trauma, have an odd inertness to them. The stakes are stated rather than felt. The film doesn't come alive until Stewart is back in civilian clothes, and even there the momentum is strictly functional — getting him from war to Capra's set by the most direct route, with his wife reduced to a footnote and his fascinatingly dark post-war filmography (Winchester '73, Vertigo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) almost entirely unacknowledged. For a career that produced some of the most psychologically complex work in classical Hollywood, that's not a selective focus — it's a blind spot. What Burns seems to want is a vaguely faith-adjacent, tacitly pro-military portrait of a man who chose service over comfort and art over propaganda, with It's a Wonderful Life as the vessel that proves the thesis. That's a legitimate film to make. But the real Stewart was a more troubling figure — proud of his service, yes, but also drawn to darkness on screen in ways that tension productively with his public persona. Jimmy doesn't want that tension. It wants the cosplay version, lovingly assembled, earnestly performed, and ultimately about as illuminating as a very good wax figure.
