‘The Last Republican’ Review: Adam Kinzinger Makes an Engaging Doc Subject in Portrait of an Anti-Trump Conservative

It’s a sign of the truly bizarre political times in which we live that the new documentary about former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger was made not by any of the usual filmmaking suspects. The Last Republican, receiving its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, wasn’t helmed by, say, Michael Moore, Errol Morris, or Barbara Kopple, but rather Steve Pink. It only makes sense when you find out that one of Pink’s previous directorial efforts, Hot Tub Time Machine, is Kinzinger’s favorite film. “It’s the thing that sold me,” Kinzinger jokingly comments, well aware of the director’s ultra-liberal leanings. “You have contempt for what I believe, in terms of political viewpoints,” he acknowledges.

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Now that Kinzinger has become a media personality, best-selling author, and darling of the Democratic Party (he recently spoke at their national convention), it’s easy to gloss over how much courage he displayed in standing up for democracy. Ironically, that wasn’t the reason he was forced to leave office; rather, it was a redrawing of the congressional map, one that put him in deep MAGA territory, that led him to conclude he couldn’t win a primary.

The filmmaker clearly had generous access to his subject during the intense period after the events of Jan. 6 that led him to defy the majority of his own party. “I thought, naively, that there’s no way people aren’t going to wake up from this,” Kinzinger says about that infamous day. He blames Donald Trump, sure — but he blames Kevin McCarthy, who resurrected Trump’s political fortunes with his kiss-the-ring visit to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, even more. After all, he points out, Trump is “nuts,” but McCarthy, a canny political operator, knew exactly what he was doing.

Kinzinger admits that he had absolutely no desire to serve on the Jan. 6 committee. “I thought, dear Jesus, not me,” he recalls, but says that he couldn’t refuse when Pelosi tapped him, only learning about it from her appearance on a Sunday morning political show. She did call him in advance, he admits, but at 5 a.m. that morning, when he was asleep.

The hearings naturally form the centerpiece of the film, with the footage inevitably feeling ultra-familiar. (Anyone interested in watching this documentary probably consumed them avidly.) But the personal comments by Kinzinger and his wife Sofia — who vividly describes her anxiety watching the events of Jan. 6 in real time and fearing for her husband’s life — prove fascinating. She says that, after the gut-wrenching testimony by several of the Capitol police officers, she texted and advised him to tell the officers that they had prevailed. He complied, tearfully comforting them, “You guys won.” Naturally, his heartfelt emotionality was mocked by the likes of Newsmax and Tucker Carlson.

Kinzinger paid dearly for his courageous acts. We hear recordings of phone calls to his office in which people threaten him and his family members in the vilest language imaginable. He received a handwritten letter from 11 family members disowning him and telling him that he had joined “the devil’s army.” And he, along with Liz Cheney, was censured by his own party. He was eventually forced to have 24-hour security at his home. “Yeah, people want to kill me,” he comments in deadpan fashion. “It sucks, right?”

Kinzinger’s less familiar backstory proves fascinating, such as the fact that he was obsessed with politics from a very early age. He once dressed up as the Illinois governor for Halloween, and even turned his bedroom into a mock campaign office. As a child, he was a Civil War reenactor. “For the North,” he’s quick to point out.

An incident from his past provides evidence that his valor began early in life. As a young man, he impulsively intervened in a late-night incident in which a man was attempting to stab his girlfriend on the street. Kinzinger was unharmed in the resulting fight, although he thinks he still suffers from PTSD as a result. There’s even surveillance footage of the harrowing event, providing the sort of cinematic emotional hook that documentary filmmakers can only dream of.

The handsome, charismatic and extremely articulate politician proves a natural camera subject (there’s a reason he’s become a television staple) and self-deprecatingly takes pains to downplay his moral stance. “I don’t believe what I did was courageous. I think it’s just that I was surrounded by cowards,” he says.

He also fascinatingly relates how, after the impeachment vote, he attempted to persuade the other nine Republican congressman who voted alongside him to join forces and try to regain control of the Republican party by taking advantage of the suspension of corporate donations and Trump’s (temporary) exile. He sorrowfully says that the others instead went silent, resulting in a missed opportunity. It goes unsaid that we may pay the price for it this November.