In Dubious Battle

In Dubious Battle (2016) is James Franco's labor drama, available to watch online on iFILM — an adaptation of John Steinbeck's early novel about a farmworkers' uprising in California.

It's the early 1930s. Apple pickers break their backs for almost nothing while the growers keep slashing their already meager pay. Young activist Jim Nolan (Nat Wolff) falls in with a seasoned strike organizer and rallies close to a thousand laborers against the landowners. Tent camps, hired muscle, scabs — and the slow, unsettling discovery that a crowd grows a will of its own, fiercer than any single man inside it.

Franco packed his Steinbeck adaptation with familiar faces: Selena Gomez, Vincent D'Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, Sam Shepard, Bryan Cranston, Josh Hutcherson. The 1936 novel lifted its title from Milton's Paradise Lost, and it keeps that doomed nerve — fight on, even when you know you'll lose. One for viewers who want their social drama bitter and free of any tidy ending. Stream In Dubious Battle (2016) online on iFILM.