Silkwood

Dir. Mike Nichols. 1983, 131 mins. 35mm print from Harvard Film Archives. With Meryl Streep, Cher, Kurt Russell. Meryl Streep is the moral center of Mike Nichols’s based-on-a-true-story comeback film, playing Karen Silkwood, the whistle-blower employee of the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant in Oklahoma who later lost her life in a suspect car accident. Yet every bit as important to the film’s sense of life-marred, lived-in working-class reality are the performances of Kurt Russell, then pegged as only an action star, as Silkwood’s boyfriend, and Cher as her lesbian roommate and confidante—an undressy role that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nod, and led The New York Times to praise her “honest, complex screen presence.”

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