There she stumbled into organizing a weekly, underground poker game for a would-be Hollywood player ( Jeremy Strong) at the “Cobra Lounge”-a stand-in for the Sunset Strip’s infamous Viper Room.
To prove her worth and distance herself from the competition of her overachieving brothers, Molly moved to Los Angeles rather than going to law school as she’d originally planned. (As the teenage Molly, Samantha Isler matches up beautifully with Chastain’s voice and demeanor.) Sorkin also goes ever further back to Molly’s youth, when she showed early traces of her independent, rebellious streak by sassing her demanding psychologist dad (a stern Kevin Costner). Inspired by Bloom’s memoir of the same name, “Molly’s Game” bounces back and forth in time between Molly’s arrest by the FBI for running an illegal gambling operation and her efforts to persuade a New York lawyer (an excellent Idris Elba) to represent her and flashbacks to how she built her glittering empire.
Reminiscent of the variety of ways Adam McKay presented complicated information in “ The Big Short,” Sorkin plays with images and graphics, grabbing us with high energy from the very start. Sorkin’s film is a bit overlong but it mostly moves briskly, especially off the top, as Molly informs us in a lengthy voiceover about her past as an Olympic-caliber skier and the freak accident that drastically changed her life trajectory.
Despite her cynical, detached demeanor, she’s a force of nature in a blowout and a bandage dress-impossible to stop watching and listening to as she narrates giant chunks of “Molly’s Game” in wryly humorous fashion. As she’s proven throughout her career-particularly in “ Zero Dark Thirty” and “ Miss Sloane”-Chastain has the presence, smarts and dexterity to take this kind of tricky material and make it sing. And in Jessica Chastain, Sorkin has found the perfect match for his densely witty repartee.
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