THE OPENING lines of Frost/Nixon reviews are the spaces that more qualified critics will likely fill with personal Nixon-hating anecdotes or inside knowledge of the tumultuous events surrounding the days when, for first and only time in history, a U.S. president tendered his resignation. But since that day in 1974 was still a good decade before I was born, the first presidency to register in my political memory belonged to Bill Clinton (whose impeachment briefly raised the specters of Watergate and the great fall of Richard M. Nixon). But the historical residue of those earth-stopping days has been clinging to news stories and political punditry ever since, particularly in the ubiquitous pejorative “Nixonian” and, as Frost/Nixon acknowledges, the damning suffix “-gate.”

Thus, it’s rather exciting to have so effortless a history lesson come along to fill in those of us who have only ever heard Nixon speak on YouTube, and have only recently heard of the now elderly Sir David Frost. Over a two-hour running time that feels like a matter of minutes (and under Ron Howard’s barely perceptible direction), Frost/Nixon sails elegantly over the highest hurdles facing historical nonfiction film. It avoids reducing its subjects’ lives to thematic arcs, and skillful recreates the intensity of the crucial moments, even for those of us upon whom the political and journalistic context of the time is lost. And it achieves all of that without being a politics movie, and really without even being a history movie. Its dating is subtle (mostly cars, telephones, and attire) and it never once feels like it was made by a self-conscious team too obsessed with making it “feel” historical.

The story is straightforward: David Frost, a smarmy British talk-show host, gets into his head that he, and not the American news networks, should be the first to interview the exiled President Nixon. Knowing Frost’s schmoozing, playboy reputation, Nixon’s staff accept the opportunity to both make their president rich and facilitate his return to public favor. As activists sign on, his regular shows drop off, and his debts pile up, Frost accepts that his wild-hair endeavor has become a worthy cause, and, on the brink of humiliation, digs into to his notes to find something on which to nail the elusive, stunningly articulate Nixon. The battle of rivaling career revivals (“there’s only room in the spotlight for one of us”) pushes both performer and politician past their initial opportunism and toward a gradual excavation of character that made their sit-down the historical event that it was.

Nixon’s climactic line (spoiled in the trailer) comes not when he sort of confesses his wrongdoing, but when he unapologetically encapsulates his executive philosophy, the one for which his critics hate him most unforgivingly. Frost asks, incredulous, if Nixon is defending the president’s illegal actions, and Nixon snorts, “I’m saying that when the president does it, it’s not illegal.” This is the movie’s true climax, as it gets at the real reason for Nixon’s eternal conflict with his opponents and the media, the reasons he would never really apologize: he honestly didn’t think he had a reason to do so. His big, semi-intentional reveal played at my screening as the biggest laugh line—a bit inexplicable considering that the executive philosophy Nixon voiced—that what the president does is inherently legal—is rather historical (see: Lincoln, FDR, etc). Some would even say it’s constitutionally defensible.

But part of Frost/Nixon’s brilliance is the way it leaves us to hash out such details of law, perhaps even suggesting they’re irrelevant, and focuses instead on telling a compelling (if composited and re-chonologized), true story. The tension in the final interview segment is so palpable—as visceral as the constant perspiration on Nixon’s face—that it has scarcely subsided by the closing scene, where Frost returns to the president’s California villa to bid him farewell. The Nixon drama continues to be so compelling that we’d happily sit longer, engrossed in this excavation of a president’s pathological suspicion. It’s in those off-script moments—just as the cameras fire up, or as they walk the grounds of Nixon’s home—that we’re seeing Sheen and Langella as two men who lived and shaped our political history, and have completely forgotten that we are watching a movie.