“This film is going to be the hardest of my career,” intimated Andrzej Wajda during preproduction on Wałęsa: Man of Hope. “I don’t want to, but I have to [make it],” the director quipped, using Lech Wałęsa’s own words about running for president in 1990. Almost two decades Wałęsa’s senior, Wajda was eighty-seven at the film’s premiere; he would go on to finish one last feature, the extraordinary Afterimage in 2016. A late addition to what the filmmaker called his Solidarity “triptych,” Wałęsa is an uncommonly propulsive biopic of the union leader, Nobel laureate and democratic statesman, who reportedly approved of Wajda’s portrayal. As in Man of Marble and Man of Iron, documentary and reportage are interlaced with fictional scenarios of Wałęsa (mostly) excelling in the public and private sphere. Robert Więckiewicz shines as the titular rebel, showing late Wajda in good control of cast, crew and national legend.