A backlash seems to be growing over the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed by American sailors. ABC news is reporting that three senators, including the chairman of the intelligence committee, are “putting pressure on the CIA to reveal just how much information it gave to filmmakers.” They are in a particular lather over the possibility that the agency, as ABC put it, “deliberately tried to mislead them into thinking torture led to the finding of Osama bin Laden.”

If we were the senators — a stretch, to be sure — what we’d do is send the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, a congratulatory note and leave it at that. We saw the picture Friday afternoon. We have no idea whether the film is accurate or imaginary, and we’re not particularly bothered by the question one way or another. It struck us as being similar in a sense to John Dos Passos’s USA, in that it’s a pastiche of fact and fiction artfully put together. It’s a terrific spy movie that gives a sense, if only that, of our long twilight war.

How big an audience is hungering for it is hard to gage. But there can’t be many teenagers who haven’t wondered what it might have been like to go one of the most famous military raids in history. It’s just the kind of thing with which one can hope any American administration would cooperate. If the movie was a propaganda piece for the Obama administration, as some Republicans feared, we couldn’t detect it. There was a brief audio clip of the president and that’s about it. No theatrics about his own gutsy call in authorizing the mission.

There is a controversy surrounding the film for its depiction of torture, which moviegoers have to sit through in the first third or so of the film. The Manchester Guardian went so far as to liken Ms. Bigelow to the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl (which would make the Obama administration what?). In fact the film treats torture in a way that we would characterize as more journalistic than anything else and, in any event, ambiguous. One can imagine, if still only that, the difficulty of sorting out the transcripts that torture produces. And the capacity for error. There is a particularly harrowing portrayal of the catastrophe at Forward Operating Base Chapman, where seven CIA operatives were slain by a suicide bomber in 2009.

Jessica Chastain does a fabulous job of hamming up the process by which the CIA agent she plays convinces her superiors that Bin Laden is holed up in the compound the CIA has discovered at Abbottabad. And there’s a wonderful portrayal of the director of central intelligence, Leon Panetta. But the best part of the movie is the depiction of the raid itself. It is something for which millions have been waiting, and it’s hard to imagine that any director could have done a better job. Our view is that the government agencies owed the rest of the country their cooperation in getting out as realistic an account as could be given without jeopardizing security. It looks like a mission accomplished, in Hollywood as in real life.