The film reconstructs the rise of Dick Cheney from an aimless young drinker in Wyoming to becoming the most powerful man behind the scenes in Washington. Discreet and calculating, he climbs the rungs as chief of staff and secretary of defense until George W. Bush picks him as vice president, an office he reinvents to amass unprecedented influence. After 9/11, his invisible hand redraws the course of the United States and the world. Adam McKay crafts an acidic political satire of frenetic editing, with a transformed Christian Bale, about ambition and power wielded in the shadows.