The Front Runner stars Hugh Jackman as U.S. Democratic Presidential Nomination frontrunner Gary Hart, whose campaign is threatened in 1988 after media reports emerge of his extramarital affair.

Directed by Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno, Tully), this film is based on a 2014 book by political columnist Matt Bai, who deduced that the Hart scandal shaped journalistic practices during a time where it was otherwise understood that news media would not disgrace the private lives of politicians. The journalists who exposed the Hart scandal lie at the centre of The Front Runner, with this exposure having a significant impact on subsequent political news coverage in the U.S.

When his teenage daughter mysteriously vanishes, David Kim (John Cho) turns to her laptop and social media accounts for clues. He shares all the information he finds with local police investigator assigned to the case (Debra Messing). But each new clue seems to raise more questions than it answers leading David to wonder how well he really knew his daughter.

In this modern mystery thriller, the story is fascinatingly and cleverly hate told through the on-screen content of the electronic devices and communication media we’ve come to rely on every day – sometimes unaware of just how much they can reveal.