Was it a little like William Wallace’s freedom speech in Braveheart?
Did it contain the drama of Don Larsen working toward that World Series perfect game?
Or maybe the vibe was more Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia, the monologist as circus master.
For those steeped in screen entertainment, the analogies came and fast and furious as Cory Booker took the Senate floor Monday night and Tuesday. Fortunately, he gave us a lot of time to come up with them.
You may not have watched anything but the last hour, or few minutes, or even a second of the Democratic senator’s 25-hour, one-sitting (or standing) opus on YouTube or C-SPAN. Trust me when I tell you the whole thing was the kind of spectacle that should be eligible for an Emmy, so subtle were its layers and so ambitious the performance.
On its face, Booker’s speech making an elaborate case against the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk was pure political theater — if theater involved a prize for never relying on a chair, food or the bathroom. As he broke Strom Thurmond’s 24 hour 18-minute mark for longest Senate-floor speech in history, the New Jersey lawmaker spoke from giant looseleaf binders of facts and read anecdotes off index cards; he thanked the Parliamentarian and gave at least his vocal cords a break by deferring to extended questions (that were more of a comment) from other senators. Booker balanced rousing constitutional ideals with basic economic litmus tests, reappropriating Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate line of “are you better off now than you were four years ago” as (fittingly for these lightning times) “are you better off now than you were 71 days ago?”
But what Booker was doing was nothing less than creating a cinematic spectacle, a binge-worthy awards contender in which all 25 hours happened to drop at once. And while the consequences are deadly serious, the techniques came from some of our most popular entertainment. Focus on different throughlines of Booker’s performance and you’d experience different arcs; come in at different moments and you’d infer different genres.
For long stretches the speech had a kind of relaxed podcast vibe, as Booker kidded with other Senators or even did quasi-comedy bits (his re-enactment of Elon Musk trying to describe to Joe Rogan why Social Security was a Ponzi scheme, complete with Muskian verbal tics, was especially Laugh Factory-ish.)
He created a series of supporting characters, including his offscreen mother, the Las Vegas-dwelling standby who had a surrogate here in Jacky Rosen, the Nevada senator.
Like all good heroes, Booker had a catch phrase. “I yield for a question while retaining the floor,” he said, over and over again, each time causing viewers to clench up just a little; should he mix up the words and yield the floor, the game would be up.
At times the speech had an air of televangelism with Booker’s booming oration about the “moral moment” or, more literally, when he tossed to Delaware senator Chris Coons, a Yale Divinity School graduate who proceeded to cite Isaiah and talk about the Bible’s attitude to the poor. When it wasn’t God-heavy, the speech had the vibe of secular religion and its High Priest John Lewis, whose story of Civil Rights-era martyrdom, and own tag line of good trouble, became a leitmotif for Booker.
Research was doubtless important — with so many substantive facts and policies on everything from Social Security-office closures to changes in veterans benefits to the details of the Federalist Papers, this was a feat as much of preparation as anything else. Sam Rockwell has his acting coach; Cory Booker has his Hill staffers. But for all the planning, Booker also had to make it look like he wasn’t straining. “An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease,” the performance guru Michael Chekhov once said, and the senator seemed to embody that, joking about the length of time he was up there, how much he generally loved the mic and how he wanted not to gaffe his way into giving up the floor, making fun of himself in a way that put us on his side. Far from someone trying to convince us he could break the record, Booker was right there with us sharing our doubts.
The whole will-he-get-there narrative kept recalling to me that 1990’s cult documentary Hands on a Hardbody, in which a series of humble strivers try to win a truck by simply outlasting their competitors keeping their hands on a Nissan. Only this time the prize was historical supremacy, a turn Booker was happy to lean into. Thurmond made his record-setting speech in 1957 breathing segregationist fury while railing against the Civil Rights Act, and Booker reminded us just enough that Thurmond could now be upstaged by a man with the kind of background he dedicated his career to keeping down.
Perhaps the secret ingredient — the unknown spice in the must-see TV casserole — is how Booker let us in on the social workings of the Senate, making it seem like just a few friends who were not that different from your own workplace buddies. Booker would pepper his speech with references to the times he and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy texted; he referenced Ted Cruz’s mid-speech kibbitz about pulling a fire alarm; he even, upon getting a request from Chuck Schumer to ask a question, smiled and said it’s the only time he’ll ever tell him no, like the boss you push back on but still secretly worry about.
In this regard, Booker may owe his biggest debt to The Kardashians, The Simple Life and other proto-celebrity reality shows, dangling the forbidden glamor only to take us behind the curtain to show how the people there jive like everyone else. Even when Booker said he had a story about another senator but wasn’t going to tell it now — a line he used several times — it drew us nearer, like the uncle who says he’ll finally tell us the secret if we can just wait till Thanksgiving.
As the speech went on the audience grew, Booker’s YouTube audience going from just 10,000 people Monday night to several times that Tuesday morning as people woke up and realized he was still going. By the time Booker neared the record Tuesday evening the channel’s viewers had swelled to 140,000. (Millions more would watch him on television and in clips on X and instagram.) What they saw was grand speechmaking that recalled Mr. Smith Goes Washington. And while no one would confuse Booker with a political acolyte, his Jersey accent and reference to his college-football days instantly undercut any talk about Democratic elites.
In fact, Frank Capra’s presence hovered in multiple ways. At the very moments Booker was returning again and again to his villainous “the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man,” Elon Musk was seen on various news channels presenting cartoon-sized checks to buy votes in Wisconsin, casting in this It’s a Wonderful Filibuster film a ready-made Henry Potter character.
Booker also understood what Oscar contenders have grasped from Robert De Niro in Raging Bull to the climbers in Free Solo — audiences love physical commitment. Whether gaining weight for a role or clinging to the side of a mountainface with your fingertips, if you show that you’ve defied some odds of the natural world you’ll immediately endear yourself to a crowd. “I am going to go for as long as I am physically able to go,” Booker said in a social video post Monday before heading out to the floor, a double-barreled statement that suggested both his commitment to the part and his uncertainty of whether he could play it.
That gave the proceeding a level of drama no Congressional speech has the right to have, the record both there and not there during the entire run, like the announcers never mentioning a no-hitter even as the line score shows zeros. As the Bluesky influencer Ben Collins noted, “MSNBC and CNN should be airing this Cory Booker thing in the same way you take over programming if there’s a no-hitter or a basketball player with 60 points in three quarters.” MSNBC, at least, eventually did, letting host Ari Melber lead his show with the performance as a clock kept score in the corner.
The length also pulled meaningfully against our viral-clip era. The speech might have aired on YouTube and TikTok, but it played against its ethos, almost delighting its audience, Brutalist-style, with its longform counterprogramming. Not for nothing did the cheering comments flash dizzyingly through the YouTube live-chat or did 400 million (!) like the TikTok telecast.
Implicit in the endurance feat was also the man Booker was speaking against, who prides himself on treating podiums like ultramarathons. Just a few weeks ago Trump set a record for longest address to a joint session of Congress with a 100-minute oration — or as Booker calls it, a quick digression. Next to Booker, Joe Rogan seems like a newsflash.
And of course came the real own, one that right-wing media is unlikely to ever cop to but that practically vibrated from its left-wing precincts: Booker was mastering the medium that gave Trump the presidency in the first place.
None of this should surprise those of us paying attention to Booker. The senator is hardly a stranger to screen drama, having dated Rosario Dawson for four years ending in 2022; surely Ahsoka Tano taught Grogu a few tricks. And let’s not forget that Booker came to national prominence on film, as the charismatic and at times controversial star of Street Fight, Marshall Curry’s documentary about the bid by Booker, then a Newark city councilman, to win the city’s mayoralty that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 20 years ago this month. He is both aware, and the beneficiary, of powerful cinematic images.
In a time when addictive-watching is down, Booker reminded us, and maybe streamers and studios too, the reasons we liked it in the first place: the unknown finale, the lovable side characters, the sense that we are part of something that matters.
And in a time when liberal morale is down, Booker was there to pick it up. What the Democrats do from here is the obvious next question, as pundits tried to quantify what this brief momentum-burst meant. “A cool glass of water in the desert,” MSNBC pundit and former Missouri senator Claire McCaskill said after the speech ended. To judge by the live-chat comments, many Democrats felt a sense of pride and hope that has been sparse since the election, and talk quickly turned to a series of rallies planned for this weekend, a Democratic win in that Wisconsin Supreme Court race, and other mobilizations.
The size of the speech’s halo of course can’t be predicted. But any actor will tell you the hardest thing is first getting a distracted audience’s attention. Booker did that. Now the weight is on the rest of the cast to finish the story.