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It's difficult for an American president to govern through nuance especially when it's necessary to persuade a majority of the people that certain actions are essential for national security. And effective persuasion usually requires clarity.

That's how you arrive at President George W. Bush's stark formulation "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists," after Sept. 11 and much of that sprang from it.

But if President Obama's newly recalibrated counterterrorism strategy as outlined in his speech Thursday demonstrates anything, it is his penchant for nuance.

It's a tendency required by the times. After more than a decade of two large-scale wars, Americans long ago hit the kind of war weariness that made them open to the notion of downsizing what Obama's predecessor had described as a global war on terror that could last decades.

But there are still enemies who seek to wage an asymmetric fight against the U.S. Thus the need for the kind of complex U.S. approach — in short nuance — that can be hard to explain or easy to misstate in the Twitter era.

For an example of this nuance, just take Obama's new guidance for when the U.S. will target individuals for destruction by drone. In the past, a terrorist suspect could apparently be targeted for that fact alone.

But the administration's new guidance, according to a White House fact sheet, requires that a suspected terrorist only be targeted if he's a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons. It is simply not the case that all terrorists pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons; if a terrorist does not pose such a threat, the United States will not use lethal force."

That's a distinction that's difficult to imagine the Obama administration's immediate predecessor making, with its more cut and dried approach.

But part of Obama's appeal to many Americans when he was first elected in 2008 was his promise of a smarter approach to counterterrorism than Bush's, one that would improve the U.S.' image abroad. That was a vow that appeared challenged, at least when it came to the Obama administration's controversial use of drones.

Obama greatly expanded the use of the remotely controlled unmanned vehicles, with their Hellfire missile payloads, far beyond anything that occurred under Bush. The result? Growing anger towards the U.S. in unstable places like Pakistan and Yemen and in other nations with Islamic majorities across the region.

While the use of the high-tech weapons has engendered outrage elsewhere in the world, Americans have mostly embraced the tactic.

Recent polls indicate a majority of Americans support drone attacks on terrorist suspects. Civil libertarians and human-rights activists like Code Pink protester Medea Benjamin who interrupted the president's speech Thursday may question the killing by drone of U.S. citizens abroad or of the innocent but that doesn't appear to be a majority concern.

It's this widespread support of U.S. drone warfare among the public that has given Obama the latitude he has enjoyed until now to increasingly conduct these attacks. The president didn't mention in his speech the popularity of the drones with Americans among the reasons for continuing their use. Americans' support of the use of drones certainly has made this part of his counterterrorism policy easier than it would be otherwise.

Ironically, the one part of his counterterrorism policy in which Obama showed the least nuance has arguably been the most vexing — his campaign promise to close Guantanamo, freeing those detainees deemed as not dangerous while transferring the rest to the U.S. mainland for trial.

It's not by choice, of course. He ran into fierce congressional resistance when he first tried to make good on his promise in 2009 shortly after entering the White House and all indications are that Republican lawmakers will do their best to thwart him again. And with most Americans agreeing with them that Guantanamo should remain open, their chances of winning are probably better than Obama's.

That doesn't really work to the film's detriment, though: Even a skin-deep biography of Plimpton is more fascinating than a deep dive about most people. Indeed, just hearing Plimpton lecture or read from his own work — which happens throughout the film, hence the subtitle — is engaging enough for a documentary of its own.

The directors spend much of the film's first half running chronologically through Plimpton's impressive CV: founding editor of the Paris Review; author of popular books and articles on his misadventures in the sporting life; friend to the Kennedys and one of the men who tackled shooter Sirhan Sirhan at the scene of RFK's assassination; star of an eponymous series of TV specials; advertising spokesman for everything from video game consoles to microwave popcorn.

It's these latter ventures that cause some consternation among Plimpton's colleagues and contemporaries. Despite the loving tone of the film as a whole, the directors do address the question of how much damage the prime-time specials and the corporate shilling may have done to his reputation. In an interview, novelist James Salter goes even further, confessing that though he may have been unfair to label Plimpton a dilettante in his younger days, "he was writing in a genre that really doesn't permit greatness."

If Plimpton's chosen genre didn't permit greatness, Bean and Poling make the case that the totality of his unique career and legacy certainly did. Whether it's the importance of the Paris Review in tapping talented new writers, the explorations into the creative mind that he navigated in his interview series for the magazine, or his role as one of the early pioneers of participatory journalism, the film portrays Plimpton as someone devoted to illuminating how talent and creativity work — both for himself, and for the rest of us.

1. Newton's Laws Of Motion

2. The Reluctance Of Brilliant Criminal Masterminds To Freely Confess

3. The Inability Of Two Things To Coexist In The Same Physical Space

4. The Integrity Of Vending Machines

5. Gravity

6. Gina Carano's Ability To Snap Most Of These People Like Twigs Pretty Quickly, If We're Being Honest

7. The Hardness Of Cars, Which Are Actually Kind Of Uncomfortable To Land On From Great Heights

8. The Assumption That Even Innocent Bystanders Who Do Not Have Speaking Parts Have To Not Die In Order For The Good Guys To Be Considered Entirely Successful

9. The Conservation Of Mass

10. The Concern That Former Models Are Often Not That Funny In Movies

11. The Tendency Of People To Be A Little Down After Witnessing Devastating Car Crashes

12. The Fact That In Most Circumstances, A Truck Is Unlikely To Contain A Tank

13. How Much It Hurts To Be On Fire, To The Point Where Strutting May Become Difficult

14. Amnesia ... Something Something Something

15. The Loss Of Velocity Of An Enormous Object Traveling At High Speed That Collides with Another Enormous Object

16. The Difficulty Of Completing A Fistfight While You're In One Moving Car And The Other Guy Is In Another Moving Car

17. The Likelihood That Even Conventionally Trained, Rule-Following Law Enforcement Officers Occasionally Learn Something Of Value They Can Successfully Use Against Criminals

18. That Guy Reminds Me Of Somebody, But I Really Don't Think It Can Be "Luke Evans," Because I Don't Know Who That Is ... Wait, Who's The One Who's Not Tom Hardy?

19. Relativity

20. Indemnification

California just unveiled a wide array of choices for the 5.3 million people expected to qualify to purchase coverage through its online marketplace established by federal health overhaul.

It's the first disclosure of prices in the nation's most populous state for individual health insurance that complies with the Affordable Care Act, and the menu of affordable options surprised some consumer advocates and analysts who had been expecting premiums to be much higher.

"I'm impressed," said Betsy Imholz, director of special projects for Consumers Union. "I actually think they are good prices," she said, especially for those who will receive federal insurance subsidies.

The worry had been that shoppers in the individual insurance market would face sticker shock when the sweeping changes of the health law take effect beginning in January 2014. The law prohibits health plans from rejecting people with pre-existing conditions and doesn't allow insurers to charge women and sicker people more.

Nearly three dozen health plans submitted bids to sell their products in the competitive marketplace, and 13 were selected. But California exchange officials, authorized by state lawmakers to negotiate on behalf of consumers, rejected bids that were too expensive, they said, or failed to include enough choices of doctors and hospitals.

"We've hit a home run for consumers," said Peter V. Lee, the executive director of the California exchange, known as Covered California.

The companies approved to sell individual insurance on the exchange include the state's dominant commercial players, such as Anthem Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, HealthNet and Blue Shield of California. A number of regional and quasi-public health plans that rely on public and university hospitals and community health centers to deliver medical care to low-wage workers were also approved.

The proposed premiums still get the OK of state insurance regulators. Three of the nation's largest players in the employer-sponsored insurance market — UnitedHealthCare, Cigna, and Aetna — aren't going to be selling on the California exchange.

The proposed premium prices vary depending on where in California the buyer lives. Other factors that affect pricing include the consumer's age and the richness of benefits.

Under the premiums unveiled Thursday, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles could choose a Health Net catastrophic plan for $117 a month or a more comprehensive plan for $147 a month from L.A. Care, the nation's largest public health plan.

People making less than about $45,600 per year would qualify for a subsidy that would lower the premiums further.

More than half of Californians shopping for insurance through the state-run marketplace will be eligible for federal income tax credits. Those credits will help offset the price of private insurance: a 40-year-old individual in Los Angeles, for example, who earns $1,915 a month, or 200-percent of the federal poverty level, would pay a monthly premium of $90 for a Health Net HMO "Silver" plan in 2014, according to the rates released by Covered California.

At a media briefing in Sacramento, which had a celebratory air, exchange officials said the restrained premiums largely reflected deft negotiating by the health plans with thousands of doctors and hospitals, including powerful hospital chains whose market clout has been blamed for rising health care costs in California.

"We made the pitch that we can't sustain the current system with 7 million Californians not being insured," said Paul Markovich, president of Blue Shield of California. "We felt there was a rate at which they could still be financially viable, but it would make rates much more affordable for this population."

The rate for an individual plan offered by Blue Shield of California will increase an average of 13 percent for existing customers, said Markovich. But the benefits, he said, as mandated by federal and state regulators and uniform across all health insurance packages, will look more like the comprehensive insurance workers receive from employers.

Health care analysts said simply calculating how much an individual's premium might increase next year was an incomplete — and faulty — assessment of the competitive marketplaces the federal health law was meant to unleash in each state. Caroline Pearson, a vice president at Avalere Health, a consulting firm Washington, said she judged California's performance by whether residents would have access to insurance products priced around $5,200 a year, the Congressional Budget Office's estimate for an average individual market premium.

And every region in California, based on her analysis, will offer plans below $4,000 a year. The offerings "strike me as very competitive," said Pearson. "It speaks to the number of carriers that were attracted to the market, and that the exchange created competition to drive down prices."