Ink, directed by Danny Boyle and set to open the Venice Film FEst on Sept. 2, is as naughty as its central character.

Lamb was the real-life editor of The Sun who — hired in 1969 by press baron Rupert Murdoch to help the tabloid break into the U.K. newspaper industry — pioneered such practices as publishing nude pictures of “Page 3 Girls.”

Murdoch, the über-capitalist whose journey out of Australia onto the global stage upended political reality, would likely approve this message. And “Ink” argues that the sins of Murdoch’s newspapers created the garish world we live in, with the consent of all of us readers. Like any juicy news story, “Ink” frames a grand drama at human scale. Here, Murdoch (Guy Pearce, building on his robber-baron “The Brutalist” energy) is at first a laughingstock. English writers and editors look down on him, calling him an “antipodean” to emphasize that he hails from Britain’s former prison-colony island. So he purchases the also-ran paper The Sun and hires Lamb, an ambitious junior editor from Northern England, empowering him to redefine the news as pulp entertainment. The partnership between two outsiders clawing their way in, joined by an equally canny journalist played by Claire Foy, comes to shape Fleet Street, the London thoroughfare where scribblers plied their trade, in Lamb’s and Murdoch’s images.

“Ink” uses filmmaking vim to address tabloid intrigue. Boyle, the director of “Steve Jobs” and “127 Hours” delves into creative excavations of complicated men, is at peak provocation. O’Connell, alternately ingratiating and hard-edged, makes for an utterly compelling antihero. There’s an irony to a film with such a mordant view of media culture debuting on one of the most closely watched stages in the world — Venice kicks off awards season, and it’s come to rival Cannes for star power. But after a recent series of high-profile Hollywood misfires like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Bardo” and “After the Hunt,” studios have taken a step back from the Lido, which means that “Ink,” and O’Connell, have the lane to themselves.

A the U.S. heads into the midterm elections with a growing sense of anti-establishment backlash in the air, “Ink” places politics front and center. Two years ago, the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice” struggled to find distribution; now, a Rupert Murdoch origin story is getting four weeks of theatrical exclusivity in December and January before hitting Netflix on Jan. 8. While Trump isn’t a character in “Ink,” the streamer’s willingness to engage the right-wing ecosystem at all, after two years of media conglomerates eschewing hot-button issues for fear of government reprisal, represents a noticeable shift.

O’Connell is 36–he came up at a time when franchises were the draw. The son of Irish railway worker and an English airline employee, O’Connell gained notice playing a street tough in the 2006 drama “This Is England” when he was only a teenager. His breakthrough as a prisoner of war in Angelina Jolie’s 2014 directorial debut, “Unbroken,” seemed to set him up as a leading man, but he shifted to crafty character work, from playing an anti-capitalist hostage taker in “Money Monster” to a man seeking to prove he was wrongfully convicted of arson in “Trial by Fire.” His version of tentpole acting has been the alluringly gnarly bloodsucker in “Sinners” or the outright demented ringleader in “28 Years Later.”

The nexus of British journalism saw pitched competition among papers — O’Connell tells me that the bar journalists went to was nicknamed “the Stab in the Back.” These writers saw themselves as craftsmen and their field as closed to outsiders; at the Daily Mirror, the standard-bearing populist sheet, the crafty Lamb hadn’t been able to get ahead. Boyle characterizes Lamb and Murdoch’s thinking: “This huge Goliath figure — Real Madrid, if you like football — is dominating the landscape. And we’re going to bring it down.”

O’Connell sees the early-1970swhen tabloid culture took root in the British mind as a missed opportunity for genuine social change. In his view, a prosperous society was teetering on the edge of a meaningful shift toward communitarianism before being yanked back. “I think there’s a real question mark thrown toward capitalism by this movie,” he says, “particularly the postwar socialism that was on the rise. For that to be traded in for unfettered individualism …” He stops and notes an irony — that freedom in the tabloid era gave rise to libertinism. “Liberty was what the war was fought for, wasn’t it? We have an unfettered amount of that now, and we’re getting to feed all of our tastes and interests all at once.”

In Ink, Lamb pushes his journalists to cover kidnapping-and-murder case that touches his own newsroom, despite ethical queasiness.

And he offers his staff a bonus anytime the words “win,” “free” or “love” are used on the front page — catering to the public interest in competition, money and sex. The Sun super-served the British brain’s pleasure centers, and “Ink,” with its careening pace through the scandal-making of pre-internet culture, delivers its share of serotonin too.

The film shws how the whole world has been warped by tabloids. By the time a 24-hour stream of distractions became available via smartphone, every member of the reading public was primed to lean into their most venal interests.

“This is an origin story,” O’Connell says. “The tabloids were purporting to offer us ‘win,’ ‘free,’ ‘love’ and a peep behind the curtain.” The paper, though, took its reader perhaps half an hour to read over breakfast. “Now,” he says, “we just get the whole show on tap.”

“Sinners” showed a more freewheeling side of an actor whose earlier film work was delivered with clenched jaw. He was cast after meeting director Ryan Coogler over Zoom, “which is mad, really! You’d think there’d be screen tests.” Once on set, though, O’Connell turned Remmick into one of the most sinuously intriguing screen villains of the century so far, as he stood outside Michael B. Jordan’s nightclub wheedling patrons into inviting him past its threshold in honey-dripping tones. The film, which broke the record for Oscar nominations, with 16, and won four trophies, didn’t take best picture — was O’Connell disappointed? “I got to kick back and watch a bunch of my friends pick up Oscars,” he says. “You win some, you lose some, and I felt like we still won big. I got to hang out with them after — I was in this amazing crew where everyone’s got these gongs, and it was a wonderful night of celebrating. I got to meet Jay-Z! Childhood me was doing cartwheels.” Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s after-party went into the wee hours: “Good on him for throwing the party — it was a throwdown. I kept trying to leave. I couldn’t!”

When not talking about the “Sinners” phenomenon, though, O’Connell chooses his words carefully, unwilling to allow them to be taken out of context. Decades into his career — and newly enlightened about the many ways a journalist might misbehave — he seems still to be deciding how he feels about the media. Back in 2014, when O’Connell was promoting “Unbroken,” a Guardian reporter asked him about his “tradition” of showing up for interviews hung over, and O’Connell shrugged in response; today, he’s sprightly but holding himself in reserve. I ask whether, growing up in the spotlight as star of the phenomenally popular teen soap “Skins,” he’d found the tabloids’ glare challenging. While he won’t get specific, he acknowledges the famously aggressive British celebrity press was hardly easy: “When you’re in the crosshairs, it can be a very miserable time.” Keeping focus on his work is safer territory than courting controversy. “I’m just very wary,” he says, “of ever being found in that position.”

“Unbroken” provided an unlikely education. Asked what he learned from the movie, he replies: “All the other aspects of being in movies, which happen not on set,” he says. “The awards push we went on, the worldwide press tour — it’s essential, but no one will teach you that. Certainly not at the school I went to.” O’Connell grew up in England’s East Midlands, attending Nottingham’s Television Workshop, a free program for aspiring actors. Though he’s met “The Odyssey” actor Samantha Morton only a few times, O’Connell says he feels a special connection with her — she trained at the Workshop too. For O’Connell, not hailing from London is a point of pride, and a way into the resentful Northerner Lamb; he notes that James Graham, who adapted the “Ink” script from his own stage play, is also from the East Midlands. “If you’re from outside of London,” he says, “you are an outsider.”

O’Connell was plucked from the Television Workshop in his mid-teens to appear in “This Is England” and then as a young hunk on “Skins,” but never thought of acting as a career path. “It felt good to feel good at it, and it was very expressive,” he says. “It didn’t matter your economic background, whether you came from a good home or a not-so-good home — you were all at the Workshop, fucking around and seeing what stuck.”

That try-anything energy persists. He was cast in a spotlight role in the cliff-hanger ending of Boyle’s 2025 post-apocalyptic zombie sequel “28 Years Later.” There, he plays Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, a satanic mastermind of violence who models himself after British kids’-TV host Jimmy Savile, a celebrity who was also a prodigious sexual predator who victimized children and the elderly. “He’s playing a monster, and yet you’re still like, ‘Oh!’” Boyle says, making an expression of curiosity and intrigue. “He pulls you in.”

Boyle had wanted O’Connell for his magnetism and in part because he wanted to cast geographical outsiders; Pearce, he notes, is likely too old for the late-30s Murdoch of “Ink,” but “a nuanced performance by a fellow Australian was very important to me.” But the film was a far cry from the lavishly funded and elaborate fantasy productions O’Connell had been making lately. Due perhaps to its moral complication, its unpopular subject — easier to enjoy when kept monstrous, as in the Murdoch-like figure Logan Roy on “Succession” — and its origins as a play, the movie was, Boyle admits, “tough to finance. StudioCanal did give us enough money to make the film, and I admire them for that, because there weren’t many competing offers.”

“He brought me in quite early in the process, before the film had its financing,” O’Connell says. “It’s very different from a film where you’re in a makeup chair for six hours before you start work, and then you’re waiting around for another six before you do anything. It’s a different type of fulfillment. And it’s a different type of exhaustion.”

“He preps so hard and he’s ready to take on anything,” Boyle says about O’Connell. “I worked with Gary Oldman onstage before he went to Hollywood. They’ve got that electricity — for some reason, they’ve just got it.”

Remmick, Jimmy Crystal and Larry Lamb share unrelenting desire to entertain, whether performing music outside a juke joint, indulging amusement with graphic violence or delighting the British reading public with scandal and drama. O’Connell may be conserving his energy in conversation — but when the show begins, he’s all in. Earlier in his career, O’Connell learned “fortitude” from stage acting, but onstage, he notes, “you rehearse for maybe two months before anyone sees it. I love a rehearsal.” In “Ink,” he was thrown into the deep end with only a week of prep time, although the production did allow sufficient time for him and Pearce to work through the movie’s opening scene, in which the pair, over a seafood dinner, plot Lamb’s installation at The Sun.

Despite the budget, there was one allowance made for the actors’ comfort. They had to keep eating, in take after take, so the meal was, at least, well prepared. “The lobster was fresh,” O’Connell says. “What’s not to love?”

The filmmakers have conjured up a story that operates in a realm of ambiguity. Boyle recalls meeting Murdoch, briefly, after “Slumdog Millionaire” broke out as a Fox Searchlight acquisition (and eventually won the Oscar for best picture). “I got invited to a barbecue, and he was incredibly shy,” Boyle says. “I got introduced to him because I’d made him so much money — I don’t think you get introduced to him if you haven’t made him a lot of money.” The pleasantries bled into “Ink,” where Murdoch and Lamb, attending a posh function, can’t wait to peel away and talk about their animating passion: work.

Boyle and O’Connell share this mentality — on set, they were mission driven. “I’ve never seen him sit down,” O’Connell says. “I wouldn’t recognize him sat in a chair.” Boyle takes that as a compliment. “Film’s natural state is inertia,” he says. “You have to drive it — I don’t mean like a monster, but in a way that’s playful and invigorating and inspiring. So, yeah, I don’t like chairs very much. I don’t want to be seen sitting down.”

The Manchester-raised rabble-rouser who broke out with “Trainspotting” sees something familiar in the Melbourne-raised publisher — and not just Murdoch’s relentless forward momentum. “He loathed the British establishment in the way that I do,” Boyle says. “Which is stupid, because I’m well established now!” He laughs heartily, then goes on. “He’s the outsider coming in, and he was treated appallingly — like a savage.” Boyle is careful to note that people’s sour judgments of Murdoch today, now that we’ve seen, for instance, The Sun’s publication of lies about the 1989 crowd-crush incident at a Liverpool football match or the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, may well be justified. But “Ink” takes place with all of that lying ahead. “At this point in time, he’s, like all of us, hopeful.”

Whether audiences will embrace that feeling remains to be seen, but the story’s grabby direction and O’Connell’s dominant performance may well capture the masses. Netflix bringing “Ink” to Venice represents a big bet after last year’s festival saw mixed results for American films generally and the streamer’s offerings specifically. (“Frankenstein” emerged from the Lido with its awards-season buzz intact; “A House of Dynamite” and “Jay Kelly” didn’t go the distance.)

“It feels premature to delve into that,” O’Connell says about what the Venice berth might mean for the film’s prospects. “I’m overwhelmed. I love the end product. And I think it’s a really cool fucking movie — what it says about Britain culturally.”

But — as “Ink” establishes that journalists employ the five “W”s — for O’Connell, the “what” is less important than the “why.” Asked whether he believes “Ink” depicts a tabloid culture that has led society to regress, he says, “I think so,” then pauses. “I’m more interested in, What is the lure?” he muses. “Why? Why are we drawn to it?” O’Connell didn’t, this time, need to toy with the supernatural to indulge his interest in the lure of nastiness. “Why are we so interested in social media and being given everything we want all at once? I guess it’s like moths to a flame.”