Richard Boyle is a shit. When we first see him, he’s being screamed awake by his wife in their squalid Tenderloin apartment in San Francisco—the landlord is threatening eviction and she’s threatening divorce. The scene has all the usual chaos of a dirty relationship: crying baby, unwashed dishes, fucked-up Venetian blinds.

As we zoom out over the next fifteen minutes of Salvador (1986), we gain a broader view of Richard’s story: he’s an out-of-work photographer, a war correspondent who’s burned every bridge with his erratic behavior, nonstop excuses, and general weaselyness. Richard is played by James Woods, who seems born to play this lanky, conniving burnout. His last friend is Dr. Rock (Jim Belushi), an equally beached disc jockey who’s between apartments and, like Richard, prone to drink and self-pity. (Belushi is also well cast, naturally exuding an out-of-shape thoughtlessness that’s the perfect tenor for this threadbare, party-animal sidekick.)

Richard has heard rumblings of trouble brewing down in El Salvador. If he could get some shots of the conflict he’d be back in the game, his name in lights and on the shortlist for the Pulitzer. Since no reputable news agency will bankroll the trip, he barrels south with Dr. Rock Fear and Loathing–style in Richard’s rattletrap car, through Mexico and into Central America. The photographer envisions a trip of long boozy nights, easy women, and the occasional skirmish—enough danger to get the adrenaline going, but preferably not requiring him to stray too far away from the hotel.

Their first glimpses of their destination set up what will prove to be a baptism of fire: a charred body along the side of the road still smoldering, and townspeople lined up along the side of the highway by armed paramilitaries. The soldiers are demanding documentation, and fire point-blank at their countrymen when they don’t get the answer they want. After a few guns pointed to their heads and tense moments of clarifying their press credentials to their would-be assassins, the two land safely in the capital city, San Salvador, with the blessings of the local government.

As international journalists covering the brewing tensions between the far-right military junta and the left-wing guerilla factions training in the hills, Richard and his colleagues (aka the bona fide photojournalists) are immune from the consequences of whatever way the wind blows. Once the action dies down they’re gone, on to the next adventure. They’re war junkies, regaling one another with recent memories from the Fall of Saigon and the horrors in Cambodia and trading recommendations about where to go after Central America fizzles. John Cassady (John Savage), a fellow photographer, asks Richard, “Why don’t you try Angola?” to which Richard cracks, “Angola doesn’t have any nightlife.” Although some journalists like Cassady straddle that line between professional ambition and a solemn desire to convey the horrors of conflict to their readers, Richard is just going through the motions, spending more afternoons with his girlfriend, María (Elpidia Carrillo), than out shooting.

Left: Richard (Woods) with María (Carrillo). Right: Cassady (Savage) photographing the unidentifiable victims.

But, slowly, the situation in El Salvador starts to get to him. The deaths are happening too quickly and too casually, and too many pat explanations by local officials and US embassy staff somehow blame the dead. Richard watches as the United States’ emissaries begins to take a greater hand in the outcome of this conflict, a déjà vu situation he’s seen before in Vietnam and Chile. The Americans are so desperate to prevent another Communist takeover that they’re willing to back bloodthirsty dictators in the name of “freedom,” and burn down the country to the point where there isn’t anyone left to govern.

At a gravesite, Richard keeps his distance from an American TV anchorwoman (Valerie Wildman)

It’s hard not to get jaded in this atmosphere, when it’s your job to translate the same lies from different languages the world over to a stateside audience who just elected Ronald Reagan as president and has little appetite for the suffering of poor people in far-flung lands. The most chilling scenes in Salvador are not when Richard and Cassady find themselves in an action-packed crossfire between military forces and the guerillas, but a dozen scenes earlier when they’re quietly and grimly photographing at dawn, roaming a hillside littered with the dead: corpses with unidentifiable faces, skeletons, children.

It’s when Richard can no longer shut off his humanity that he fully begins to grasp the terror of the situation, and does what no “good” journalist should do—he starts to take sides. He gets involved and harnesses all his scheming persistence into harassing everyone: the US ambassador, American military generals, local officials. But in his desperate efforts to divert the crosshairs away from innocent Salvadorans, he puts a target squarely on his own back.

Salvador was writer-director Oliver Stone’s breakout film, the one that paved the way for two decades of peerless success and relevance. Woods garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, and Stone received a Best Original Screenplay nod with cowriter Richard Boyle—yes, this film was loosely based on Richard’s real-life exploits in El Salvador, and seeing his name in the opening credits hints that he did manage to return to California with at least his typing fingers intact.

Although the Richard Boyle in the film is often unpleasant, he’s our window into this terrible conflict, one that consumed El Salvador for more than a decade. It’s through his awakening to pain and righteous struggle that we begin to see his humanity in the face of so much death. Dialogue between Richard and US officials or other journalists that may have been tedious exposition at the time of the film’s release is now helpful background, a refresh on a conflict now forty years old, lost in a blur of all the horror that’s happened throughout the world since. Sure, Richard’s a shit, but by the end of Salvador, he’s our hero.

Salvador is available to stream for free via Tubi and PlutoTV, and to rent online via Vudu and AppleTV. Subscribe to Sleeping All Day here