A new movie about Ronald Reagan—called, simply, Reagan—opened last weekend. The professional critics savaged it, while ordinary Americans loved it.  I saw the movie myself, and I’m glad I did. While Reagan isn’t perfect, it is a classic of the Hollywood biopic genre, reminding us of a visionary president with the smarts and skills to make his visions a reality.

The movie is built around Paul Kengor’s biography, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Given the movie’s plot origin, it’s no surprise that the movie is built around Reagan as the great Cold Warrior who brought down the Evil Empire. That explains the movie’s structure, which distressed so many reviewers.

Rather than being a simple linear retelling of Reagan’s life, the movie has Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight), a former KGB analyst, explain to a rising Russian political star, Andrei Novikov (Alex Sparrow), how it was that one man—Ronald Reagan—was able to lead the charge that broke the Soviet Union. This framework allows the movie to show both how the Soviets viewed Reagan (from being a nonentity to being a supreme threat) and how Reagan’s views about communism developed over his life, leading to his desire to liberate people from that totalitarian prison—and to keep America from ever entering that prison.

Although critics complained about the movie having too many flashbacks, it really doesn’t. However, the movie’s beginning is a bit befuddling.

The first scene shows Reagan speaking at an AFL-CIO event, leaving the event, and getting shot. Then, it suddenly moves to modern Moscow, as some rather confusing dialog (most of which I missed) explains that Novikov needs to talk to Petrovich. Ignore all that. The movie really starts when Petrovish explains how Reagan became the anti-communist “Crusader.”

Running to two hours and twenty-one minutes, Reagan manages to pack in a huge amount of life story. We get the small Illinois town upbringing, the loving and religious mother, the alcoholic father, Reagan’s roles as a lifeguard, radio broadcaster, and Hollywood actor, his failed marriage to Jane Wyman (played with no small cruelty by Mena Suvari), his election to and tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild, his meeting and marrying Nancy, his years in the wilderness as a fading actor, his decision to enter politics, his role as governor, more years in the wilderness, his becoming president, the assassination, and his facing off against the Soviet Union, eventually weakening it financially and also destroying it morally in the eyes of the world. It’s all there.

The movie would have been tighter had it left off the preliminary material about what shaped the young Reagan and, instead, presented Reagan as a fully formed Christian and anti-communist. That’s because the movie’s real starting point is Reagan’s tenure as SAG president.

It was then that he faced down Herbert Sorrell, a communist union organizer, and met Nancy Davis, who would become the single most important person in his life. Incidentally, it was Sorrell’s attack on the Disney studios, including the defamatory claim that Walt Disney was an antisemite, that turned Walt into a fanatic anti-communist. Walt Disney would weep at what cultural Marxism, a communist movement, has done to his studio.

From the SAG saga on, I was fully engaged in Reagan’s story. And even though I lived through Reagan’s political career—my memories start with Reagan as the governor of my home state, California—I didn’t understand it. Like Reagan himself, I was raised in a Democrat home and was a Democrat until my 40s. In other words, I accepted as gospel the claims that Reagan was a dimwit who got real life confused with the movies.

Seeing Reagan’s story told from an admiring rather than a derogatory viewpoint was fascinating. In the 1980s, those people still untouched by a left-leaning public school system and a relentlessly (but carefully secret) pro-communist media realized how wonderful Reagan was. They saw and benefitted from his domestic policies and his brave fight to keep America free and liberate people whom communism had enslaved. It’s no wonder that, back when America still had a majority of sane adults, Reagan swept 49 states in the 1984 election.

The movie also works because the actors do a great job. Dennis Quaid catches perfectly Reagan’s body language and speech cadence. I was especially impressed with Penelope Ann Miller, who does an even better job with Nancy Reagan—and makes her a much more sympathetic character than I’d ever understood her to be.

Between costumes, makeup, and competent acting chops, the actors who play historical characters such as George Schultz, James Baker, Margaret Thatcher, Dana Rohrabacher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Tip O’Neill, all do a great job, too. Should all of them win Academy Awards? No, but they brought the characters alive, and that was enough for me.

The movie also has an incredibly funny riff about the last few Soviet leaders before Gorbachev came on board.

At the end of the day, the only problem I had with the movie was rather silly. It turns out that it’s easy enough to use Hollywood magic to age a young actor. It’s harder to use that same magic to make an old actor appear young.

Dennis Quaid is 70 years old, and, no matter how the film tries, when Quaid appeared as Reagan in the 1940s and 1950s—when Reagan would have been in his 30s and 40s—Quaid looks weirdly wrong. Periodically, his age peeps through the makeup and his hands, those of an elderly man, are always apparent. At those moments, it looked as if the movie might switch to a 1950s sci-fi flick when a character suddenly strips off the mask to reveal the alien hiding within.

Having said that, if a few weird moments at the beginning of the movie are the worst I can say about it, you can believe me when I say that Reagan is an excellent movie, well worth two-and-a-half hours of your time.

(This link will tell you where you can watch Reagan.)

Image: Fair Use.