Trio of strong actors cut loose in war drama ‘Last Flag Flying’

Two wars, Vietnam and Iraq, intersect in memory and grief in “Last Flag Flying,” a drama that gets considerable mileage out of its three outstanding leads.

It’s 2003, just after the start of the Iraq War, when soft-spoken Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Steve Carell) walks into a bar owned by motormouthed ex-Marine Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston), who’s also holding court with his regulars. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” Doc asks Sal, and soon Doc has to remind him: The two served together in Vietnam, up until an incident that got Doc thrown in the brig for a couple of years and mustered out of the Navy with a Bad Conduct Discharge.

Sal and Doc reminisce for a bit, but Doc has a favor to ask Sal. Doc’s son, Larry Jr., a Marine, was recently killed in Iraq, and Doc needs help claiming his body from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The Marines have arranged a military burial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, but Doc wants to take his son’s body home to New Hampshire, to be buried alongside Doc’s late wife.

Sal and Doc hit the road, but they pick up one more person for this trip: their old Vietnam cohort Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), another retired Marine. Sal remembers Mueller as a hard-partying horn dog back in the day, so he is shocked and amused to find out that Mueller now is a Baptist minister.

Sal and Mueller serve as almost literal angel-vs.-devil figures on Doc’s shoulders as he wrestles with the realities of his son’s death. In Dover, Doc meets Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson), a Marine corporal who was Larry Jr.’s best friend back in Iraq — and who tells a different story of Larry Jr.’s death than the official version quoted by the officious Col. Willits (Yul Vasquez), the Marine officer in charge of Dover’s mortuary process.

After some false starts — and some unfortunate stabs at humor based on post-9/11 paranoia — the three Vietnam vets, accompanied by Cpl. Washington, take Larry Jr.’s body on the train to New Hampshire. Along the way, the three old friends talk about the incident that led to Doc’s imprisonment and the tragic secret the three men have kept for decades.

Director Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”) has co-written a loose screenplay with Darryl Ponicsan, on whose novel the story is based. (The novel was a sequel to Ponicsan’s 1970 novel “The Last Detail,” which was made into a 1973 movie starring Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid, but the characters’ names and backgrounds have been altered here.) The road-movie format fits Linklater’s talents for letting characters shoot the breeze, revealing their fears and regrets through unhurried conversation.

Not all the conversations lead to much, and the ones that resonate do so because of the central performances. Carell and Fishburne are solid in tightly reserved performances, leaving Cranston to let fly as the sharp-tongued Sal, who’s ready to lay down verbal barrages against Col. Willits’ authority or Mueller’s Christian faith or anything else that annoys him. This trio prove to be engaging travel companions and make “Last Flag Flying” worth the trip.