Bob Roberts
Bob Roberts is a 1992 film directed and written by Tim Robbins. It is a satirical faux-documentary on the rise of a right-wing senatorial candidate. The main character, Bob Roberts, played by Tim Robbins, leaves his hippie parents to enlist in a military academy. Fuelled by a personal fortune he amasses on Wall Street, and a strong public image from his music, which proposes a neoconservative vision in a rebel's persona, he embarks on a bid for the position of senator of Pennsylvania. The film aims to portray the American political process in a less than favorable light, indicating that shady deals, hypocrisy and deceit are the domain of the Republican party. Robbins' personal animosity towards the Republican Party is quite transparent.
Gore Vidal portrays Roberts's incumbent Democratic opponent. Humorously (given Vidal's real-life sexual predilections), his character becomes enmired in a sexual scandal with a young girl. The ensemble cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Rickman, Harry J. Lennix, David Strathairn, James Spader, Helen Hunt, Peter Gallagher, a very young Jack Black, Robbins's wife Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, Fisher Stevens, John Cusack, Bob Balaban and Jeremy Piven, some in very brief cameo appearances.
Tim Robbins also wrote a song as "Bob Roberts" for the 1988 movie Tapeheads.