By James Pethokoukis

I generally avoid film biographies, knowing how wildly inaccurate they tend to be. Such movies frequently alter facts, compress timelines, and introduce characters that didn’t exist in the real story. Give me a documentary any day, especially if the subject is entrepreneurs and other businesspeople.

Yet I took a chance over the weekend on The Founder, a biopic about Ray Kroc of McDonald’s. The 2016 film stars Michael Keaton as the man who wasn’t actually the founder of the global hamburger chain. That would be Dick and Mac McDonald, who opened the first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California, and developed the “Speedee Service System” that gets food quickly to customers. It was Kroc who took the company national and then multinational.

Eventually, The Founder gets to the business disputes between the brother and Kroc. Those conflicts provide much of the dramatic tension in the latter half of the film. Before that point, however, The Founder is a paean to the entrepreneur. One of the best bits of the film is a sequence where the brothers use a tennis court to map out their Speedee Service System. They constantly change the potential layout of the restaurant with chalk on the court as a group of workers pantomime the process of serving customers.

The Founder also does a great job of showing the struggles of building a business, as Kroc labors to ensure quality control at new McDonald’s franchises. Any small business owner can surely relate to Kroc sweeping up the parking lot of his first franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois.

But the film needed another half hour to tell this story — particularly McDonald’s battles with upstart Burger King. After watching The Founder, I checked out a 2019 History Channel documentary on that competition, “The Kings of Burgers.” It provides a great case study on how competition drives innovation. In this case, Burger King’s introduction of The Whopper led Kroc and the much bigger McDonald’s to obsess about a response, one that first led to its popular Filet-O-Fish sandwich and then the Big Mac.

All that said, I would still have to give The Founder high marks, especially factoring in Hollywood’s anti-capitalism bias. A welcome surprise!

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