'The Death of Stalin' is a hilarious, subtle dig at Trumpism

It's a shame that comedies rarely (if ever) get nominated for Best Picture, because the critically acclaimed satire The Death of Stalin has all the substance and gravitas of an Oscar movie, but it's also hilarious as hell.

It's an enlightening and elegant satire that turns on an absurd conceit -- we're asked to accept a sprawling cast stocked with primo British and American actors (including Steve Buscemi, Monty Python's Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor and a scene-stealing Simon Russell Beale) playing some of the most iconic, upper-echelon Russian leaders during and after the death of dictator Joseph Stalin in the early 1950s.

These actors make no attempt to do a Russian accent and instead play a high stakes game of political backstabbing and manipulation with frantic, deadpan honesty. Never once do the characters look at the camera and wink at what's happening and what makes this black comedy so devastating is how utterly real and plausible it all feels.

Director Armando Iannucci, who is the brains behind HBO's sublime Veep, mined this type of comedy before with his fantastic spoof of the run-up to the Iraq War, In the Loop. But with this film, he is even more ambitious, not shying away from the violence and inherent fear of Stalin-era Russia, while still layering in some wonderfully amusing character work.

Of course, looming like a shadow over this piece is our current cultural climate -- not just in Russia, but more specifically here in the U.S., where the president is increasingly surrounding himself with like-minded sycophants and openly floating the idea of maintaining power for life.

It's impossible to watch this film without thinking about how it doesn't feel quite as distant and unthinkable as it should be -- and that may be what's best about it. More than a few 'yuks' in this movie stick in your throat.

This isn't just a diverting Christopher Guest-style lark, it doesn't shy away from the violence and degradation in the totalitarian regimes that ruled the Soviet Union for decades, and so there's real stakes that make the comedy moments work that much more.

The cast is flawless. Buscemi gives one of his patented always-on-the-brink-of-a-meltdown performances, Jason Isaacs is tremendous as the swaggering, metal-covered head of the Russian armed forces, and Tambor is just masterful at playing a sniveling version of Georgy Malenkov, the man initially tapped to replace Stalin.

But my favorite performance in the film may be the least overtly comedic. And that's Simon Russell Beale as the ruthless head of the Soviet Union's secret police Lavrentiy Beria. He plays his part mostly straight, and is by turns both very creepy and deeply funny. It's an Academy Award calliber performance, but it also feels like a chillingly realistic one.

Audiences watching this movie might see a touch of Steve Bannon in Beria, a puppet master of sorts who has lost control over the beasts he has unleashed. His role helps make this film feel unlike anything I've seen, at least in recent years. It's a period piece that feels fully modern and bitingly relevant.