As writers and actors walk the picket line, the British actor and comedian, Russell Brand, is calling out Hollywood for offering nothing new and being obsessed with identity politics. This trend, he warns, reflects an America that’s losing the self-confidence required to shape global culture.

“Stay Free” is Mr. Brand’s streaming program, which he moved to Rumble from YouTube to escape the very policing of thought that he sees constraining studios. In a recent interview, the comedian posited a hypothesis. “American movie stars somehow embody how they regard that nation in particular,” he said. “Let’s face it, it’s still the nation that defines our planet” and movies reflect how “America sees itself at a particular time.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Brand said, “what we have is an America that doesn’t know what it’s trying to sell itself anymore trying to present a kind of ethical and moral face to the world.” The result is “our culture is incapable of coming up with new and novel and innovative content, and it’s kind of a tomb raider dragging cadavers from the soil, reanimating them, and then not even respecting them.”

Mr. Brand discussed the topic with the Scottish critic and thriller author, Will Jordan, YouTube’s “Critical Drinker.” The two examined why America has lost its “spirit of creativity,” seeking “diversity” and delivering bland sameness instead.

Mr. Jordan said that modern Hollywood relies on rehashing established characters, “particularly with comic book movies,” rather than nurturing starpower. Gone are writers, directors, and actors like Orson Welles, James Stewart, and Sylvester Stallone whose work defined previous generations and drew people to theaters. 

Films of the 1940s explored World War II trauma. Those of the 1950s and 1960s played on Cold War fears. The 1970s delivered character studies after assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate. The 1980s, Mr. Jordan said, “was the time of American confidence” as leaders of the Free World. “‘We’re going to kick ass! We’re going to dominate. We’re going to do awesome,’” he explained. 

In the 1990s, Mr. Jordan saw films delivering “more ambiguous, slightly more vulnerable heroes,” and the first decade of the 21st Century, of course, was “very much reflective of the War on Terror.”

The only hallmark of the 2020s seems to be race- and gender-swapping legacy characters to generate buzz, which is publicity, not plot. “You look at now; there’s nothing,” Mr. Jordan said of Hollywood’s brand. There are, he says, “no movie stars because the country doesn’t even know what it is. It’s a conflict of identity.” He contends it’s “sad to see.”

Modern Hollywood further shackles its storytelling ability, Mr. Jordan said, because they’re afraid to show women with flaws. Protagonists that arrive perfect with “the rest of the world having to learn to accept how awesome they are.” What might be exciting character arcs are reduced to unsatisfying straight lines.

Mr. Brand said that he has two daughters and wants them to see “strong female characters,” but that compelling characters are “vulnerable” and “flawed.” They fail to overcome a set obstacle but persevere, developing skills that allow them to triumph.

Old Hollywood, Mr. Jordan said, sought to create “interesting characters first and foremost. Whether they were female, black, white, whatever, it didn’t matter. … That’s what we can’t do now.”

As for getting more than “straight, white guys” and including “people of different genders, ethnicities, all that stuff,” Mr. Jordan says Hollywood “did it 20, 30, 40 years ago” with characters like Ellen Ripley in 1979’s “Alien” and Sarah Connor in 1984’s “The Terminator.” 

The difference, as Mr. Jordan says, is “we didn’t make such a big deal out of it like we have to do now” or make superficial characteristics like race and gender “the sole focus of everything.”

“I think we are definitely stuck in a rut as a culture when it comes to just relying on the past,” Mr. Brand said. To haul itself out of that rut once the strike is settled, Hollywood will have to end its reliance on grave robbing Golden Age intellectual properties and produce some fresh ideas. 

Only by abandoning the view of movies as platforms to push an agenda can Tinseltown return to the storytelling that made it — and America — the leader of global culture.