Aaron Sorkin never truly feels his scripts are finished. “They’re just confiscated,” he says. “There comes a time when someone says, ‘Pencils down.’”

So when director Michael Arden proposed the first Broadway revival of “A Few Good Men,” Sorkin saw an opportunity.

“The play needed another draft or two,” Sorkin says. It had been a hit when it ran on Broadway in 1989, and Sorkin himself adapted it into a 1992 film led by Tom Cruise and directed by Rob Reiner, but there was still more to be done. “Michael allowed me to do another draft and to hang a subtle lantern on this new, very relevant theme: A search for decency. What is it to be decent?”

The revival opens on Oct. 29 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. And while the emphasis may have shifted, the plot remains the same: Amidst the court-martial investigation of two U.S. Marines accused of killing a Private, Joanne Galloway (played here by Krysta Rodriguez) must convince Daniel Kaffee (Tom Blyth) to pursue a lead implicating the imposing Colonel Nathan Jessep as complicit. That role — the personification of U.S. military might and of its corruption — was played on film by Jack Nicholson, and is now inhabited by Bradley Whitford, who’d been a replacement Kaffee in the first stage production.

The play’s depiction of extrajudicial killing and out-of-control military leadership resonate with Whitford. “I wish I lived in a world where this play wasn’t so terribly relevant again,” he says. “It should be a little courtroom chestnut about a time that has passed. But the fundamental argument on the planet today is: Do we survive through law and civil structures, or do we give into the dangers of thinking you can kill your way into security?” The question the plot of “A Few Good Men” asks is whether Jessep oversaw the murder of an inconvenient soldier in order to preserve unity among his corps. And the question hanging above it is whether Kaffee can push himself to do the right, but inconvenient, thing in fighting back.

The concept of a lawless military felt familiar for the cast. “Every time you look at the news,” says Blyth, “you see something about Pete Hegseth’s military — and how it’s going back to this exact time.” Indeed, the only reason Sorkin didn’t set his new draft in the present day is that Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military base where the play is set, has become a detention facility for migrants, complicating the story.

“I’ve admired this country,” says Blyth, an Englishman who came to the U.S. to study at Juilliard and has led films including “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” and “People We Meet on Vacation.” “To be doing this play, as a person who has chosen to come here, at a time when America is having a reckoning about war and masculinity — I’m loving sorting through Pandora’s box.” This marks Blyth’s Broadway debut, and he rapturizes about the theater in his adopted homeland. “I got the bug when I was really young, and American playwrights — it’s the epitome of great work.”

The play’s politics extend to gender: Rodriguez, a Broadway veteran, notes that her character, played on film by Demi Moore, outranks Blyth’s in the military, but she’s second on the legal team. “She’s insulted constantly,” Rodriguez says. “She’s diminished. She’s told no — and she finds a way every single time.” (And, she notes, Galloway must do all that Kaffee does “in a pencil skirt and heels.”)

The current Secretary of Defense comes up again, as Sorkin remarks to Rodriguez that “one of the things [Hegseth] is doing is kicking out women. Hyper-qualified women are gone.”

The misogyny “is not anachronistic,” Whitford says. “There are these moments when I go after her, but we have a president who says, ‘Quiet, piggy!’ to women. Why is this play so fucking relevant?”

But it isn’t just politics that make “A Few Good Men” both intriguing and thorny for its cast. Whitford, who after his first run in this play appeared on Sorkin’s TV shows “The West Wing” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” has by now experienced the writer’s famously rhythm-driven dialogue — although there was a learning curve. (He recalls throwing up backstage the first night he played Kaffee, wondering, as he puts it, “Why did I let my life bring me to this?”)

Arden, who has won Tonys for musicals “Parade” and “Maybe Happy Ending,” notes that the two straight plays he’d wanted his whole career to direct were “this and a Shakespeare. Both are musicals in their own way.” As he puts it, “it moves from scene to scene with a dexterity that is technically impossible — and that’s what musicals are.”

The pace of the Sorkinian banter is meaningful beyond its showiness. It reflects the characters’ intelligence — though they’re at odds, none is the dumb one. “You see our competence in the way we can volley back and forth,” Rodriguez says. “It puts people at ease that we know what we’re talking about, that we can keep that ball in the air.”

But it is simply fun on its own terms, too. “It’s buoyant,” says Blyth. “And a lot of that is the pacing. We’re having fun with it — which you would think would be antithetical to the message of the play, but I’m a big fan of serving your medicine with something sweet.” He looks forward to hearing audience laughter: “The audience is much more receptive when they’re able to have a chuckle, right before they get slapped in the face with reality.”

Conjuring that reality has taken hard work. Much like Whitford back in the late 1980s, Blyth is realizing that Kaffee basically never gets to leave the stage. “I keep wandering off into the wings when a scene is done — when I should be starting the next scene,” he says. “It’s not that I want to leave!”

But then he’s filling the shoes of Tom Cruise — no small feat, even for a Juilliard grad. Making the politics seem urgent to a New York audience, may be relatively easy compared to this production’s more pressing task Blyth, Rodriguez, and Whitford are stepping into roles played by legendary movie stars in a film that, as many expressed in the wake of Reiner’s death, is now seen as a modern classic.

Arden says that many people he’s met think he’s making a new adaptation of the film’s script, not a revival of a play. “I have to correct them and remind them of theater history. We’re approaching it not as the film on stage but as if we were approaching a classic text. Even if they’ve seen the film, it will feel new and like we’re a pace ahead of the audience’s memory.”

“There’s a solemnity to the movie that the play does not have,” Whitford says. “Usually, if you’re doing a comedy, you have this artificial obligation to be funny all the time, and if you’re doing a drama, you have this artificial obligation to be irony-deficient.” This production, solemn about our obligations to one another but committed to providing a good night out at the theater, is neither. Says Whitford, “Aaron weaves those things together in a really organic way.”

Lead illustration: Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection. From left: Pierre Mouton/Getty Images for Dom Perignon; Scott Kirkland/FXX via Getty Images; Taylor Hill/Getty Image