Joseph Gordon-Levitt appeared on Bill Simmons’ HBO show Any Given Wednesday this week. This being a Bill Simmons show, the two largely bantered about sports: Boston / LA rivalries were a major feature; so too Gordon-Levitt’s childhood baseball movie, Angels in the Outfield. But at the end of the interview, the two men chatted about the actor’s new film, Snowden. Amongst anecdotes from production and moderate expectations for the film, Gordon-Levitt had this to say about what kind of movie Snowden is: “This movie, it’s a drama. It’s not a documentary, it’s not a work of journalism. It’s meant to be a fun, entertaining thriller to go to in the cinema.”

Whether this is obvious to you or not (it should be), the point is crucial and worth remembering for any discussion of Oliver Stone’s Snowden. Snowden is not akin to Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’ Oscar winning documentary chronicling Edward Snowden’s hand-off of confidential documents to journalists. That story, of Snowden’s acquisition of data and his travel to Hong Kong to hide out in the days following, these events need little dramatic embellishment. They are haunting and scary days of national and international consequence.

Citizenfour, then, this is not. This is Oliver Stone. This is, as Gordon-Levitt makes clear, ‘not a work of journalism.’ So what is Snowden?

That’s a bit trickier to pin down. Snowden boils down to a seemingly simple picture: it’s a biopic about a patriotic guy named Ed, and his slow disillusionment with the government he serves. But there’s more happening in Snowden; this is Oliver Stone making a political picture, and that fact, even in 2016, carries meaning that must be reckoned.

My biggest fear going in to Snowden was that Oliver Stone would turn the film into a ‘real-life Bourne’ story: an international pursuit that pits the Lone Hero against the most Powerful Government in The World. Stone pulls one or two directorial tricks from the Bourne adventure ilk-a couple helicopter shots of Ed as he rides is moped through Europe, a sexy scene in bed with Ed and his girlfriend. But the director rejects the impulse to make Snowden a sexy action thriller. There’s plenty of tension in Ed’s decision to blow the whistle on the NSA’s illegal spying programs; why pull the audience into unnecessary, unrealistic action?

Stone, instead, offers the opposite of our expectations for a spy/government thriller. He tells a slow moving, story with almost no action and little interpersonal conflict. The film opens with Snowden in special forces training in the Army. It’s 2004, and Snowden, a conservative, enlisted in the army to fight in Iraq. He is motivated by the events of 9/11, and he wants to serve his country. Unfortunately, he breaks both of his legs and is discharged. “Plenty of other ways to serve your country,” the Army doctor tells him.

To accomplish that aim, Snowden goes to work for the CIA, and for the next eight years he will work for the CIA and the NSA, either directly or through contracts with tech companies. These jobs will have him living in Europe, Japan, Hawaii. Snowden’s brilliance is clear to his superiors immediately, and he rises quickly through the bureaucracy and the security clearances until the day in 2013 when he walks out of the his office with a Rubik’s Cube full of data.

The only relationships Snowden has outside of his professional life in Snowden are with his girlfriend Lindsay (Shailene Woodley), who he meets online during his time in the Army and is by his side throughout his globe-trotting work life, and the three journalists with whom he shares his data dump: Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Ewen MacAskil (Tom Wilkinson).

Beyond this, there’s essentially no value in describing the events that unfold in Snowden. The story is well known and not yet three and a half years old. The details that surround this story are fascinating, but they too are of little reporting value. This isn’t journalism; Stone is not pretending to make a docudrama, like Zero Dark Thirty. He is shooting, it seems, for something more akin to his 1991 political investigation, JFK.

In JFK, Oliver Stone pulled every bit of information that has ever been written, said, or thought about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and he built a mountain of suspicion, paranoia and distrust on top of it. JFK barely carries a coherent argument; instead it captures a mood and a value system, one built on patriotism and disillusionment and fear. JFK asks questions not to offer the answers but because asking these questions fundamentally alters the trajectory of the world. Stone balanced JFK, a three-hour epic of obsession, on the twin peaks of paranoia and conspiracy and he pulled it off; it is the director’s best film.

This is the well that Oliver Stone has returned to in Snowden.

Snowden is not about what Edward Snowden did in May of 2013. It is about the political world that Ed inhabits, the government that brought that world into existence, and the despair that results from getting to see it for what it is. This a movie meant to create emotional reactions in its audience, primarily shock and anger. This is what Oliver Stone does when he is making an Oliver Stone Movie. Evocative and unsettling are apt descriptors; you will think differently when you leave, whether you’d like to or not.

Snowden is no JFK. But the task is not the same. I mean, how do you build paranoia around government spying when everyone already knows that the government was (and is, let’s be honest) spying on all of us. Still, comparing any political to JFK is unfair. Snowden works because Stone knows how to manage his audiences; if he wants an engaging political movie that also deadens a little bit of your faith in our government, well, that’s why you see an Oliver Stone movie.

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