Returning to his homeland to cover the controversial presidential elections five years ago, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) pointed his camera in the wrong direction, capturing images of the government responding to Green Movement protestors with undue violence. One morning shortly thereafter, secret police came to his mother's (Shohreh Aghdashloo) home and placed him in custody, spiriting him to a solitary-confinement cell in a Tehran prison. Over 100 torturous days later, after any number of beatings, death threats, absurd lines of questioning, and coaxed statements, he was released, his ordeal having received international media notice.

In his directorial debut, iconic political satirist and Daily Show host Jon Stewart tells Bahari's story with earnest vigor and a certain degree of sentimentality. It is almost two films in one. For around 45 minutes, it plays as a blow-by-blow, on-the-ground depiction of the 2009 election and the fallout after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's suspicious landslide victory. Then it transforms into a Kafkaesque nightmare of grey spaces, soul-crushing prison routines, bureaucratic torture, and out-of-left-field questions and declarations (for example, a Sopranos DVD found in Bahari's room is labeled illegal pornography). In the second half, Stewart could honestly do more to intensify the claustrophobia and torment (mental and physical) experienced by Bahari. He is clearly hesitant to push too far in the degradation-and-filth-and-tears direction exemplified by a hard-edged film such as Steve McQueen's Hunger, focusing instead on ways to open a very tightly focused storyline to the air, including imaginary conversations with Bahari's father and sister, both held as political prisoners themselves in the past.

People have criticized the casting of a Mexican actor to play an Iranian, and they may or may not have a point, but this cannot be denied: García Bernal is an intuitive and sharp talent, and he delivers a very fine performance here, his almost nerdy enthusiasm on the outside giving way to convincing anguish and then poignant transcendence inside the prison. Also superb is Kim Bodnia as "Rosewater," Bahari's primary (and anonymous) torturer, so named because of the overt perfume announcing his dangerous presence to blindfolded captives. Bodnia portrays him as a volatile brute of a man with a slight tendency toward sad-eyed introspection, as if he partly understands his actions are cruel and wrong, but cannot find the courage to step outside his circumscribed existence and is therefore almost as condemned as the men he hits, questions, and dehumanizes.

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