Nature lovers aren’t all hermits, hermits aren’t necessarily survivalists, and survivalists don’t have to be terrorists, and they certainly aren’t all intellectuals. But notorious mail-bomber Ted Kaczynski was all of these, even as his legacy became one of madness above everything. It’s why his Jeremiah Johnson-meets-Travis Bickle existence, which produced the longest manhunt in FBI history before his capture in 1996, seized the country’s imagination — once it stopped troubling its sense of everyday safety.
Kaczynski was his own bundle of nerves as a self-styled David fighting the Goliath of a technology-ruled society. And actor Sharlto Copley wrings that energized instability for all its worth in filmmaker Tony Stone’s vividly rendered “Ted K,” an impressionistic biopic determined to venture into the polluted habitat that was the Unabomber’s brain.