Usually when an actor takes on the role of a familiar real-life personality, emphasis is placed on the summoning process. That goes double for when one performer is playing another, recreating one brand of showmanship with another, often augmented by top-level make-up – and with a creative inspiration closer to photocopying than portraiture.

In Primetime, a film adapted from an Esquire article going behind the scenes of an infamous episode in the history of Dateline NBC’s briefly popular To Catch a Predator spinoff, Robert Pattinson certainly does a surprisingly capable imitation of host Chris Hansen. He doesn’t much resemble him physically. But when the movie recreates the scenes the show is most famous for – a man, meeting someone who he thinks is a teenager, suddenly confronted with a TV host asking incriminating questions – he captures the insinuating inflections of Hansen’s anchorman righteousness, which makes him sound like a kind of tabloid Rod Serling. What Primetime captures even more precisely than Hansen, though, is the entire culture orbiting around, and percolating underneath, the To Catch a Predator phenomenon. It’s a true-ish story about a TV show; it’s a truer story about the 2000s as a decade.

Primetime true story: How accurate is the Chris Hansen movie?

Some of the details of Primetime have been changed and compressed, as is usually the case with fact-based fiction films. The movie finds Hansen with To Catch a Predator already a success, and poised for more: Early on, he receives news that the show will have a spot on NBC’s primetime schedule. Much of the film is about the introduction of Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), a fictionalized version of real-life performer Dan Schrack, who is contracted to “play” the fake teenagers created by online chats. Character actor Matthew Maher plays the lead guy in charge of luring in horny and morally pliant men online, pretending to be teenage girls and boys alike) during the filmed sting operations. Indie-rock star Phoebe Bridgers plays his more experienced female equivalent.

As Dan acclimates himself to this bizarre, breakneck world of vigilante-tainment, Hansen revels in the power he appears to be consolidating as a broadcaster. Maybe, he seems to think, he can even catch up to Stone Phillips, the Dateline anchor he observes with obvious envy. We’re invited to wonder what he wants more: to haul away predatory adults, or to be known as the crusader who gets that job done?

The emotional and psychological machinations of Chris Hansen are clearly extrapolations, not facts, per se. Still, many of the details of Primetime are closely adapted from the Esquire article, though the latter focuses more intently on one particular ambush than the film, and the law-enforcement logistics that Primetime keeps to the side of its narrative.

What the movie renders more fuzzily, within the story it wants to tell, is how the show aired before and after its supposed big break. Primetime vaguely implies that Predator was either a stand-alone show being moved from another slot into primetime, or a regular Dateline NBC segment being given its own time slot, then curtailed by the events chronicled in the film.

In reality, it was a recurring Dateline segment spun off into full-hour specials, then briefly positioned as more of an ongoing series, though how many episodes it would air in a season seems ambiguous. The movie makes it seem as if Predator has been churning out episodes on a regular basis for longer than it actually had been; in fact, the longest stretch of Predator episodes that aired consecutively came in the spring of 2007, well after the downfall implied by the movie.

But director Lance Oppenheim doesn’t just have dramatic reasons for simplifying this timeline. Without overreaching, he manages to evoke the entirety of the 2000s depicted through just one show over the course of just a few months. At the forefront, even if the characters don’t know it, is the dying gasp of pre-streaming network TV. There’s a weird nostalgic current when hearing executives discuss how To Catch a Predator might be able to take on ABC’s blockbuster hit Lost. Shows like Lost helped turn the tide away from the post-Survivor reality craze of the early 2000s, but Predator shows the genre nipping at fiction’s heels, ready to give way to true-crime podcasts, quickie Netflix docs, and all manner of new forms for what was once mere sensationalized faux-journalism.

That material might not have settled in for a lengthy network run – the networks would soon be unable to even count themselves in for the long haul – but it eventually mutated and migrated to the internet, which Primetime also depicts in a seedier 2000s-era form that resonates today. Most of the world isn’t yet connected to social media during the movie’s 2006 setting, but the accessibility of anonymous online chat (and the lack of real guardrails for the young) hints at the ways this kind of unchecked reach will soon become everyone’s problem.

There’s even some Minority Report-style, post-9/11 pre-crime in To Catch a Predator’s methodology, which involves, essentially, catching, arresting, and/or shaming potential predators who technically haven’t yet acted – all through a fixation on perceived threats to children that inflames so much online discourse today. Hansen’s self-image as a vanquisher of an “ancient evil” sounds unnervingly similar to a QAnon soldier.

The kaleidoscope of cultural flash points is not too far removed from what Oliver Stone was doing in the ’80s and especially ’90s, making feverish big-canvas statements about large swaths of American cultural history and associating them with our addled present. Stone calmed down in the 2000s (though his George W. Bush biopic W. probably benefits from a less amped-up approach, and is underrated!), and Oppenheim’s approach to that decade isn’t especially similar to Stone’s in style. Oppenheim’s work has a hint of modern cringe comedy, especially with Pattinson, one of our most meme-friendly actors. You can also imagine Stone’s version of producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) would be more of a hard-charging caricature; Wever makes her flashes of vulnerability, expressed primarily by what looks from greater distance like career suicide, weirdly touching even as she prioritizes ratings over people at every turn.

The relentless pursuit of ratings sounds downright quaint now, given the increasingly foggy metrics through which entertainment and/or journalism are measured. Yet through its time capsule, Primetime manages to feel queasily up-to-the-minute in telegraphing where so much of the culture was headed, even as these traditional frameworks started to shake and collapse.

The movie makes mirrors and windowed reflections into a visual motif; at one point Hansen’s image in a rainy window makes it look like his face is melting off. What Oppenheim and Pattinson capture about the famous host is less his familiar mannerisms than those distorted copies of his image, and all the places that wound up reflecting them.