Inside the New York Times

Does the notion of a documentary about a 160-year-old newspaper seem coma-inducing? Then think of "Page One: Inside the New York Times" as a High Noon shootout between a flawed hero and a nefarious, charismatic villain. The stakes: your right to reliable news.

In the white hat, David Carr, the pugnacious, foghorn-voiced star columnist for the Times' media desk. A rumpled master of the Lt. Columbo shuffle, he lulls his opponents into lowering their guard before plugging them between the eyes. Wearing black, Sam Zell, the Dr. Evil of print journalism. The predatory tycoon bought the faltering Tribune Co. (which controls some of the more influential papers in the country, including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times) with money borrowed from the employees, stiffed 10,000 nonunion staffers with a worthless stock-ownership plan, and turned the staid Tribune into a frat house run by radio executives with the mentality of shock jocks and the social conscience of rabid weasels. The film documents the new owner's brainstorm that the Tribune should add a porn section to build circulation. As Zell steered the company into financial and ethical bankruptcy, he rewarded his 20 top cronies with $57 million in bonuses.

Carr unpacked this mess in a blockbuster 2010 article, one venerable media giant calling another to account in a manner that no squadron of bloggers could hope to copy.

How the Times achieves such reporting, while adapting to a perilous new world of declining circulation, layoffs and new digital life forms, is the story of "Page One." Director Andrew Rossi doesn't fulfill the year-in-the life promise his subtitle implies. The film's attention is whipsawed endlessly by breaking news developments. Boomeranging back to the media desk provides the film what little focus it has.

Carr, ever the loyal Timesman, doesn't subject his employer to the same brand of unsparing prosecutorial analysis that he trains on outside subjects. "Page One" feels overgenerous to a paper that is vital to our national discourse, but as flawed as any institution. No one pins down the editors who dither over the ethical tangles created when the Times coordinates its coverage with Wikileaks freebooters. No one questions former Times Executive Editor Bill Keller's mealy mouthed platitudes about the Times' draconian newroom cutbacks. You may feel the urge to grab the elegantly attired desk jockey by his $400 tie and hang him from the nearest lamppost.

The film works best when it sticks close to its star, whose bestselling memoir "The Night of the Gun" chronicles Carr's lost years as a self-described "violent, drug-snorting thug." At a broadcast debate on the merits of mainstream journalism, Carr holds up a printout of the website Newser that resembles a curtain full of holes; he cut out every story the online site had leeched from the "old media." When critics cite the Times' scandalous missteps - from Judith Miller's fake stories concerning nonexistent Iraqi WMDs to Jayson Blair's serial fabrications - Carr counterpunches with immaculately reasoned defenses of the paper's ambitious, expensive journalism.

Some might call Carr's disdain imperious. I call it delicious. (Disclosure: As reporters with Minneapolis roots, Carr and I share old friends and professional associations, but he has never bought me a beer.) Rossi tags along on Carr's return trips to Minneapolis, where he recounts his drug bust inside the Skyway Lounge strip club, and gives a profane pep talk to the dispirited members of the Minnesota Magazine Publishers Association. Carr becomes the film's central metaphor, a battered but unbowed survivor who has remade himself time and again, usually for the better. If the newspaper industry needs a role model for its own painful metamorphosis, it could hardly choose a better example than Carr.