The first audience for Talk Radio didn’t sit in a movie theater. Eric Bogosian and Tad Savinar staged it at the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1985, then took it off-Broadway two years later, where producer Edward R. Pressman bought the film rights and brought Bogosian along to adapt and star. Oliver Stone initially came aboard to co-write, then stayed to direct. The finished screenplay also draws from Stephen Singular’s book about Alan Berg, the Denver radio host murdered by white supremacists in 1984, which gives the movie an uglier real-world charge underneath all the performance and provocation.

Barry Champlain (Bogosian, Uncut Gems) rules the late-night airwaves at Dallas station KGAB by insulting, needling and occasionally charming the people who call him. A national syndication deal is within reach, which has station boss Dan (Alec Baldwin, Beetlejuice) sweating every unpredictable minute. Barry’s producer and girlfriend Laura (Leslie Hope, 24) has learned to brace for impact, while his ex-wife Ellen (Ellen Greene, Little Shop of Horrors) drifts back into his orbit at exactly the wrong time. As for one especially memorable caller, the less you know going in, the better.

Bogosian owns every inch of that booth. He had already lived with Barry onstage for quite some time, and that familiarity lets him play the character with a stand-up comic’s timing and a boxer’s instinct for where to hit. Barry can turn a caller into a punchline in seconds, then suddenly seem wounded when somebody lands one back. He’s funny, cruel, insecure and addicted to the attention, all while insisting he’s the smartest person in the room.

Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson understand that the radio studio has to become more than a location. The camera keeps moving, circling Barry, closing in, catching him in reflections and turning a few cramped rooms into something that feels increasingly airless. The effect is almost physical by the end. It’s a movie about a man who can’t shut up, and it’s impossible to look away. That doesn’t make Barry easy to spend time with. Quite the opposite. The film never really asks you to like him, and Bogosian is smart enough not to soften the character just because he’s carrying the movie. Barry can be magnetic one minute and exhausting the next, and the movie works because those two things are constantly happening at once. He needs the callers as much as he claims to despise them, and every insult feels like another attempt to prove that he’s still in control.

What makes Talk Radio sting even more now is how familiar the whole ecosystem feels. Barry’s business is outrage. People call because they want to be heard, abused, validated, challenged or simply noticed, and he knows exactly how to turn all of it into entertainment. Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me had already shown what one obsessed listener could do to a radio host. Barry has thousands of them, and decades later, the machinery around people monetizing anger has only gotten louder.

The movie didn’t find much of an audience in 1988, earning roughly $3.5 million against a budget of around $4 million despite generally strong reviews. It fared better at Berlin the following year, where it won a Silver Bear. That critical afterlife makes sense. Talk Radio is abrasive, claustrophobic and deliberately unpleasant in ways that don’t exactly scream casual Friday-night viewing.

But when Bogosian is at that microphone, it’s electric. Barry keeps pushing everyone around him toward the edge and seems most alive when he’s standing there too. He makes a living daring people to hang up, and the movie dares you to do the same.