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Heaven only really knows what goes on in the back rooms of political offices and bureaucracies. Today’s headlines are rarely as simple as they seem – and rarely do they seem very simple.

That’s why it’s fun to speculate. Films like The Queen, Frost/Nixon, and Charlie Wilson’s War, among others, extrapolate on actual reported political events to humanize their characters and give the moviegoing public some kind of window into a moment in history, no matter how fabricated this back story may be. Television shows like The West Wing and The Wire take events that are close enough to possibility and build a cast of characters around them that doesn’t exist, but could, and thereby explore the private side of public events.

In the Loop, a kind-of-political kind-of-comedy, is a darker, funnier, more obscenity-laced variation on this theme. It’s hilarious, in a darkly and obviously British-inflected way that makes you laugh and squirm and groan and grimace. As the characters assume their best madcap, balls-out approach to saving their jobs and economies and relationships and reputations and maybe the world, they perform a farcical version of what could easily happen.

It’s a complicated story, but in brief, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a mid-level British minister of something or other, cannot keep his foot out of his mouth and accidentally gets in the way of the US President and the UK Prime Minister who, familiarly, would like a war. He gets into an enormous amount of trouble with the foul and frightening Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the PM’s communications director, and is left having to dash back and forth across the Atlantic to fix things, along with his possibly too adorable assistant Toby (Chris Addison) – who runs into a old friend from university (Anna Chlumsky), who turns out to be a lesser kind of Delilah, who works for a demanding diplomat (Karen Clarke), who has a strange liaison with the peace-loving retired U.S. general (James Gandolfini) . . . you get the picture. It’s a giant mess and it’s great, uncomfortable fun to watch it unwind.

The story hurtles along at breakneck speed (if it was an American film, Aaron Sorkin would have written it, but probably with less inventively profane name-calling) and without much mercy for its characters or their flaws. At the same time, these characters are wholly believable, and their oopsies and meteoric rises and falls are addicting, in the way that power grabs hold and does not let go. It’s also a comical look at the difference between a somewhat stodgy British political system and its more ridiculously young and audacious American counterpart.

It’s not what you’d call nuanced, or sympathetic, or thoughtful, but In the Loop is smart and wince-inducingly, bitingly, great.