'Mank' Soundtrack From Trent Reznor And Atticus Ross Now Streaming

Hey, do you need 1 hour and 33 minutes of music to fill your day? Well, you're in luck, because here comes the Mank soundtrack! The score, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, runs for 52 tracks, which is pretty damn long, even for a soundtrack. Mank, David Fincher's film about the writing of Citizen Kane, hits Netflix today, and with it comes the release of the soundtrack, which you can stream below.

The Mank soundtrack is now streaming on Spotify, and it's long. It runs for 52 tracks at 1 hour and 33 minutes, bringing you wall-to-wall jazzy sounds courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. And if that's not long enough for you, you can purchase an even longer version here. It runs over 3 hours for 87 tracks. Yes, really.

Reznor and Ross have worked with director David Fincher several times already, on The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl. But the music that the duo created for Mank is a bit different. It's not nearly as droning or ominous as those other scores – it swings, it bops, its blasts trumpet sounds into your ear holes. Back when Reznor was first asked about the score, he confirmed that it was definitely going to be a change of pace. "We're not gonna be using the modular synthesizer on that one," the Nine Inch Nails frontman said. "We think we're gonna be period-authentic, so it just creates a new set of challenges."

In Mank, "1930s Hollywood is re-evaluated through the eyes of scathing social critic and alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he races to finish the screenplay of Citizen Kane for Orson Welles." While there's plenty of buzz surrounding Mank, there's also been some backlash due to the film's portrayal of Mankiewicz as the sole author of the Kane script, a theory that was popularized by film critic Pauline Kael. Kael's claims have since been debunked, but the legend persists, and there's a concern among film fans that Mank will popularize the "Orson Welles didn't even write Citizen Kane" myth further.

In any case, I enjoyed the film. Does it take liberties with history? Oh yes, there's a lot of fictionalization here. But that's standard practice for any biopic, so it's hard for me to take Mank to task for doing the same. As I wrote in my review:

The script is punchy and not afraid to lean into melodrama, and Fincher is clearly having fun bringing his father's words to life. Much of the story here feels lifted from film critic Pauline Kael's controversial "Raising Kane" essay, which lays all the work of Kane at Mankiewicz's feet and cuts Welles out of the equation. Several notable people have discredited the essay's claims, but no matter – it makes for a cracking good yarn. And a great movie. It's the stuff that dreams are made of, to quote another old Hollywood story from 1941.