In Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks plays lawyer James B. Donovan.
Donovan is a Brooklyn attorney who becomes involved in the Cold War case of Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy captured in the United States. He later helps negotiate a prisoner exchange involving Abel and the American pilot Francis Gary Powers.
The film draws on real events, but it is a dramatic reconstruction rather than a documentary. Mark Rylance plays Abel and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role. Hanks’s Donovan is portrayed as a principled negotiator who insists on legal fairness during a period of intense political pressure.
Bridge of Spies was released in 2015. Spielberg directed it from a screenplay by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. The title refers to the Glienicke Bridge, associated with Cold War prisoner exchanges between East and West Berlin.