“The Sun is the laughing stock on the street.” So says Larry Lamb, the ambitious newshound at the heart of Ink, Danny Boyle’s energetic, even romantic, look at the birth of one of Britain’s most controversial tabloids. Adapted by James Graham from his own play, The Sun may indeed have been a laughing stock at the fag-end of the Sixties. But by the time Lamb, and a certain Rupert Murdoch, are finished, Britain’s media landscape has been changed irrevocably.

Opening this year’s Venice Film Festival, Ink is a rip-roaring race through recent history. Set in 1969, it begins at Rules, London’s oldest restaurant, as Lamb (Jack O’Connell) is lured by Murdoch (Guy Pearce) to head up his new purchase from the Mirror Group. Reluctant at first, Lamb is soon hitting his stride, assembling a team to redefine newspaper culture and launch “the people’s paper”, a tossed aside phrase they willingly steal from the Daily Mirror.

Among them is Jules (Claire Foy), an amalgam character of various women who worked in Fleet Street at the time. It’s she who suggests sex as a regular topic for the paper, when Lamb quizzes his staff what they like to do. “Women masturbate,” she shrugs, before later urging the paper to feature banned book The Sensuous Woman, which delved into female sexuality. Is it pornography or education? Some may argue the super soaraway Sun niftily skated better the two.

Others in the office span the spectrum of the British class system. Among them Ray Mills, played by Blake Harrison, who true to the actor’s Inbetweeners character, suggests The Sun should feature plenty of “boobs and bums”. Then there’s the ultra-posh, standoff-ish Bernard Shrimsley (Patrick Kennedy), who loves to quote “serial shagger” Lord Byron and, in one of the more amusing asides, reveals that he likes nothing more than adapting the French plays of Émile Zola into English in his spare time.

In some ways, this is familiar terrain for Boyle, who previously explored the titular tech titan in 2015’s Steve Jobs. Here, the Australian-born Murdoch – played with zest by Pearce – is the pioneering tycoon with ink in his blood. With a chip on his shoulder about his place in British society (“the Aussie sheep farmer,” he jokes), he’s desperate to upset the establishment. Blatantly, his mission is twofold: business and revenge.

Intriguingly, the future media mogul is not the villain of the piece; rather, it’s Lamb, who becomes increasingly obsessed with the fledgling paper’s sales and sticking it to his former Mirror bosses. Of course, the film touches on the paper’s evolution, from its red-top logo to the advent of Page 3 and the development of tabloid-lingo (“Be cheeky... confident,” says Lamb, as a voiceover actor recording a commercial announces: “It’s p***y week in The Sun.”)

True, there are moments in Ink that don’t entirely work, not least Lamb’s vivid dream that he’s been tarred and feathered, masquerading as psychological insight). But what it does have going for it is O’Connell, who reunites with Boyle following his provocative Jimmy Savile-inspired gang leader in 2025’s 28 Years Later. Following that and his work in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, this continues a period of captivating work by the young Brit.

Whether Ink has much to say about the depressing tabloid culture it fostered is debatable. And certainly there are some who will argue a paper like The Sun, with all the controversies it’s caused, and a character like Murdoch don’t deserve any screen time. But with Boyle conjuring the same sort of fizz he generated for his landmark Trainspotting here, it’s an unapologetic, unfiltered ride. That’s the headline.

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