The Brink of War: How a New Film Depicts Diplomacy on the Big Screen

There is something genuinely refreshing about a new Hollywood film that takes nuclear diplomacy seriously.

The Brink of War, opening August 14, dramatizes the extraordinary October 1986 meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland. The Reykjavík Summit lasted just two days, but the two leaders came remarkably close to an agreement that could have transformed the nuclear balance—and potentially put the world on a path toward eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

That is a story worth telling.

The Brink of War is also a reminder that telling an important story and telling it particularly well are two different things.

There is plenty to admire here. The performances are strong, the direction creates a palpable sense of tension, and the film succeeds at something that most movies about the Cold War don’t attempt: making negotiations themselves dramatic. That’s no small achievement.

For most of the film, the central action consists of people sitting in rooms, talking. They argue over missile defenses, nuclear arsenals, verification, and the extraordinary possibility of eliminating entire classes of weapons. There are no battlefield explosions to propel the story. The stakes come from what might happen if the people in the room get it wrong.

And that is precisely what makes the film’s subject so relevant.
 

A summit that almost changed the world

The real Reykjavík summit was remarkable for how quickly the conversation moved beyond conventional arms control. Reagan and Gorbachev discussed deep reductions in strategic nuclear weapons, the elimination of intermediate-range missiles, and ultimately the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons.

They did not reach an agreement. But describing Reykjavík as a failure would miss the point.

The negotiations helped lay the groundwork for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and subsequent arms-control agreements. More importantly, Reykjavík demonstrated something that is easy to forget when nuclear policy is discussed primarily in terms of deterrence and military capability: negotiation can change what countries believe is possible.

The summit came remarkably close to a deal that would have eliminated ballistic missiles and potentially put the United States and Soviet Union on a path toward eliminating their nuclear arsenals. Reagan himself described the discussions afterward as bringing the two countries “closer than ever before” to agreements that could lead to a world without nuclear weapons.

That history deserves a wide audience.
 

Then there is Ronald Reagan

This is where the film becomes more complicated.

Jeff Daniels gives Reagan a capable, charismatic performance. But the film’s Reagan is also unmistakably heroic. He is energetic, focused, intellectually nimble, and seemingly in complete command of the negotiations. The movie has little interest in the ambiguities or limitations of the aging president; instead, it presents him as the man who understood the stakes, saw the possibility of nuclear abolition, and had the resolve to pursue it.

There is certainly a historical basis for some of that.

Reagan really did become deeply invested in the idea of eliminating nuclear weapons. He really did put the possibility on the negotiating table at Reykjavík. And he really did have to contend with resistance from within his own administration and national security establishment. Declassified records show that the proposal to eliminate ballistic missiles encountered substantial opposition from officials who worried about its strategic implications.

But The Brink of War pushes the heroic version of Reagan much further than the historical record requires.

Watching it, I was reminded of a remarkable Saturday Night Live sketch from 1986, “Ronald Reagan, Mastermind.” The joke was that the public’s genial, occasionally befuddled image of Reagan concealed an astonishingly calculating strategic genius who was secretly running circles around everyone around him.

The joke worked because it inverted the popular perception of Reagan. The Brink of War sometimes feels like that same premise, though substituting drama for a punchline.

The film is so committed to portraying Reagan as the energetic master of the room that it leaves little space for the more complicated reality of an aging president, the institutional machinery surrounding him, or the enormous contributions of the people who helped make diplomacy possible.

That matters because great diplomacy is rarely the product of one heroic individual.

Reykjavík was the result of years of preparation, negotiation, competing advisers and institutions, and a counterpart in Gorbachev who was himself willing to contemplate extraordinary changes to the existing security order. The U.S. State Department’s historical record describes the summit as extraordinary precisely because of the breadth and depth of the negotiations—not because one president single-handedly engineered them.

The more interesting story is therefore not Reagan the mastermind. It is what happened when two leaders, supported by teams of diplomats and advisers, were willing to imagine that the assumptions underpinning the nuclear arms race could be changed.
 

What the film gets most right

For all my reservations about the movie, I finished it feeling grateful that it exists.

Nuclear weapons are remarkably underrepresented in popular culture considering their capacity to destroy human civilization. And films about nuclear disarmament and arms control are rarer still.

The Brink of War puts something on screen that deserves much more attention: negotiation is not a sign that leaders have run out of options. Negotiation is itself a form of power.

At Reykjavík, the United States and Soviet Union were adversaries with enormous nuclear arsenals and profound distrust of one another. Yet they sat across a table and explored the possibility of eliminating weapons that had come to define the security strategies of both countries.

They didn’t succeed that weekend.

But they kept talking. That distinction matters.

The lesson of Reykjavík isn’t that diplomacy always works. It doesn’t. Nor is it that adversaries simply need to sit down together and their differences will disappear. The lesson is that diplomacy creates possibilities that military confrontation cannot.

It creates opportunities to clarify intentions, test assumptions, identify areas of mutual interest, and reduce the risk that a crisis becomes a catastrophe. And sometimes, as Reykjavík demonstrated, negotiations can move the boundaries of what governments believe is politically and strategically possible.

That is an important message at a time when diplomacy is too often treated as an afterthought—something to try after military options have been exhausted.
 

We need more stories like this

I wish The Brink of War had trusted its subject more.

It didn’t need to turn Reagan into a near-mythological figure to make Reykjavík compelling. The real story is already extraordinary: two leaders at the height of the Cold War came within reach of an agreement that could have dramatically reduced the world’s nuclear arsenals. That’s more than enough drama.

And perhaps that is the most encouraging thing about the film. Whatever its shortcomings, it is part of a welcome trend toward bringing nuclear issues back into popular culture—not simply as the backdrop for an apocalyptic thriller, but as a subject worthy of serious attention.

We need more stories about the people who negotiate arms-control agreements, verify them, defend them, and work to prevent nuclear crises. We need stories about the risks of nuclear weapons, but also about the people trying to reduce those risks.

Most of all, we need stories that remind us that the future is not predetermined by the weapons we have built.

At Reykjavík, the United States and Soviet Union came remarkably close to imagining a different world. The challenge today is to imagine one again—and then do the hard, patient work of negotiating our way toward it.

The Brink of War comes out in select theaters on August 14, 2026. The film is directed by Michael Gunn and stars Jeff Daniels as President Ronald Reagan, Jared Harris as Mikhail Gorbachev, and JK Simmons as George Schultz.