There’s something quintessentially American yet distinctly unsavory about the origin story of McDonald’s.

As told in the new docudrama “The Founder,” it’s largely the story of Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a traveling milkshake-machine salesman who, in 1954, chanced upon a small San Bernardino, California, hamburger stand run by Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch). Kroc partnered with the brothers, becoming head of franchise operations, but soon grew impatient with their reluctance to embrace what Dick McDonald calls Kroc’s “crass commercialism.”

Ultimately, “The Founder” also is a story of betrayal, as Kroc cuts the McDonalds out of the business, eventually buying their name and forcing the original store to close on his path to leading what would become a global empire.

Director John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side,” “Saving Mr. Banks”) phoned from Pasadena to talk about the film and its love/hate relationship with its antihero.

Q: Considering “The Founder’s” unflattering look at McDonald’s, were you concerned about obtaining legal permission to use the company’s intellectual property?

A: That was my first question when I walked in the room to interview for the directing job.

Q: As I understand it, the principle of fair use would apply to a historical film. Is that why no approval was sought from the company?

A: We thought we were on good legal footing. This is not a contemporary McDonald’s takedown. It’s not “Super Size Me” (Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary about the effects of an all-McDonald’s diet). On the one hand, I can see how some people might watch the movie and think, “I have a different feeling about McDonald’s now, and it’s not good.” I can also see how some would go, “Wow, I only saw McDonald’s as this international behemoth, and there are faces behind it now.” Two of those faces — the McDonald brothers — are kind of endearing.

Q: The website of Lisa Napoli’s 2016 biography of Ray Kroc and his second wife, Joan, takes issue with the film’s accuracy, including the scene in which Kroc delivers a blank buyout check to the brothers at Mac McDonald’s bedside, after he’s been hospitalized from stress. Nitpicking aside, is the film broadly accurate?

A: I think it is. Kroc wanted to buy them out and said, “Come up with a price.” The way to dramatize that is: Hand them a blank check. As opposed to having a phone call or lawyers talking, which would put everybody to sleep.

Q: Even some people who know Kroc’s story may be surprised by details in the film, such as the revelation that he was briefly a professional piano player.

A: Michael’s line was an ad-lib, when he says, “I used to sell pianos,” and then gets up and plays. It’s not a documentary. We don’t have any proof that Ray sat down with Joan (Linda Cardellini) and played a duet of “Pennies From Heaven.” We do know that he met her when she was playing piano at Rollie’s Steakhouse.

Q: There are stories about Kroc being something of a neat freak, and you show him cleaning his garage to relax. Just as he rushes off camera to the garage, the film cuts to a shot of his suit, neatly folded on the bed. What does that suit represent?

A: In that particular scene, he was coming in from work, and his first wife (Laura Dern) was almost ready to go to the club for dinner. She’s laid his suit out. I just liked the idea of there being an empty suit there. Does that mean he’s dying inside? In terms of him being fastidious, we do have the scene with him at night, sweeping like a maniac. There are all these stories about him going through the McDonald’s parking lot at night and picking up gum. It’s something that Michael and I talked about a lot. Do we define his journey — his forward lean — from a behavioral standpoint, from a dialogue-and-delivery standpoint or from a clothing standpoint, as his clothes change? He just becomes more sharklike as the story progresses.

Q: What has the reaction to the film been?

A: Everyone brings their own attitudes to a movie. The way this movie has affected people has been really gratifying to me, like hearing two people argue about it, and one person is saying: “Hey, you know what? Those brothers would have driven me nuts. You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and Ray had to do what he had to do. I get where Kroc’s coming from.” Somebody else might be saying: “Ray’s a monster. What are you talking about?” I love that. The two most boring versions of this movie would have been (1) a Horatio Alger story: Kroc picks himself up from the bottom to become a global king, and (2) some kind of corporate takedown of Kroc and McDonald’s, showing him for the villain that he is. The fact that he’s neither good nor bad makes him human.

Q: So he’s both visionary and villain?

A: Absolutely. I admire the fact that he took his employees with him. His bookkeeper, June Martino, became second-in-command of McDonald’s. Fred Turner, who became head of McDonald’s, was flipping burgers at one of his restaurants. At the same time, some of the more incendiary quotes come directly from Kroc’s mouth: “If any of my competitors were drowning, I’d stick a hose in their mouth and turn on the water.” That’s Kroc’s line.

Q: You’ve spoken in interviews of the film’s unintended Trumpian overtones. Will that help or hurt the movie?

A: It’s a really good question. I wish I could answer. When we made the movie, it wasn’t in the DNA of anything we were doing, but the parallels are pretty obvious. It’s been said that when you make a period movie, it’s always more about the period in which it is made than the period it depicts. Watching it the other day for the first time in several months, during the whole montage of Kroc taking his hiring pitch to the streets — whether it’s the VFW or the Shriners or the synagogue — and hitting the hard-working Americans out there who want to better themselves, it struck me as a populist message. Michael and I talked about that. He said, “Wow, he’s not giving them any details, is he?” I said: “That’s not important. He’s trying to talk about things they can easily grasp: opportunity, hard work, the American Dream, gold at the end of the arches.” It hit me that that’s the current state of politics, unfortunately.

Q: You said that “The Founder” is not “Super Size Me.” But don’t the two films bookend the McDonald’s story nicely?

A: I could buy into that double feature.

Q: Perhaps they both have something to say about addiction?

A: I think you’re right. What happened to America, post-World War II, was: We won the war. ... We deserve it. We want it, and we want it now. In effect, it was the original idea of Super Size. America was bursting its buttons. There’s very much a “Super Size Me” thing going on with regard to business now.