War, and no peace, for one soldier

The movie cuts between the filmmakers' time with Young, who took a bullet near the spine that left him paralyzed from the legs down, and C-SPAN footage of senators and representatives arguing for and against passing the war resolution. In 2005, Young returns to Kansas City, Mo., and marries his fiancée, Brie. But the movie in trudes with montages of the speechifying that went on in the Capitol three years earlier.

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.

At the end of the montages, a voice off-screen announces the vote ("McCain: Aye!" "Clinton: Aye!") while a graphic tracks the tally over a shot that gazes up inside the Capitol dome. Invariably, the highlight of these sequences is Robert Byrd, the long-serving, ex-segregationist Senator from West Virginia, whose attempted filibuster gives the movie its theatricality. Byrd is frail and ferocious, but he's convinced he's right. He's also an archival discovery.

Young is a real find. His injury inspires him to speak against the war at rallies across the country, including one in Crawford, Texas, beside Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son the same day Young was shot. He's sincere. He's witty ("Supporting President Bush is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders"). He's affable. And he's frequently exhausted, often having to interrupt a speech to slow down his spinning head or allow his fluctuating body temperature to settle down. Poignantly, the young soldier and the ancient senator seem to have corporeal diminishment in common.

With Young, the movie gets fascinatingly specific about what living with paralysis entails. For one thing, it means living without sex. Tomas and Brie seem resigned to his erectile woes, having tried many tricks in many books. And you can sense the inevitable fracture in their bond - not because of the lack of sex but because of how the intimacy has shifted from the carnal to the custodial. But neither of them really ever complains.