As entertainment, the movie is not great but still definitely good. As history, Reagan is likewise solid. As an expositor of the right sort of public character, it is very good indeed. As a tribute to one of the greatest Americans of this or any lifetime, it does a more than admirable job, even if it lacks nuance and tends toward hagiography.

And in toto, the act of watching it is 141 minutes well spent. For those old enough to have been adults in the era of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the film is a fine reminder of the remarkable victories for freedom in the 1980s. For those not old enough, it can teach salutary lessons that today’s pathetic educational system usually distort and mangle, often with malice aforethought.

Dennis Quaid plays the 40th U.S. president with heart and admirable effort, even if he can’t capture the resonant timbre of Reagan’s unique voice. The set decorators, costume folks, and other visual-detail people do a masterful job recreating exact replicas of real scenes, captured on still or live film, from Reagan’s life, and the dialogue from many of those scenes is word for word as history recorded it.

The movie’s Reagan, like the real one as described by so very many of those who knew him, is a singularly resilient, willful, and sincere man of goodwill and of profound insights about the nature of freedom and of ideologies that threaten it. More important, he was one of those figures who changed history, for the better, in ways not a single other living soul would have done. What the movie Reagan teaches is that history is not just a result of anonymous, impersonal, inevitable “forces,” but instead changes through the willpower and choices of individuals.

So, no matter what the leftist narrative now is, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed on its own. It had to be pushed. And it had to be pushed in the right way, with the right touch, with the right safeguards. Without Reagan the man, the Washington consensus was dead set against doing the sorts of things Reagan did, with the depth and width of necessary public support he attracted, without which the Soviets would have survived and maybe triumphed.

Indeed, this theme is so important that it is the main point of the one completely ahistorical part of the whole movie. The filmmakers create a purely fictional device of a young Russian who clearly is a disciple of current dictator Vladimir Putin, asking an ancient spy leader (played by Jon Voight) how the great Soviet Union collapsed. It is the Voight character’s account that provides the viewpoint for the story’s entire narrative, including the unshakeable conclusion that Reagan was the essential driving force behind the Soviets’ defeat.

What this film does not do well enough is explain that the Soviets were not just aggressive (which is amply detailed) but evil — which is what Reagan says but what the movie doesn’t fully show. For a better sense of just how existentially frightening the Soviets were, several Reagan documentaries are better. (I have seen so many. I forget which is good and which isn’t, but one of the excellent ones is Citizens United’s Rendezvous with Destiny.) Reagan does, however, show the personal qualities that made Reagan so likeable, and it details the experiences that molded him and that he himself used proactively to mold his history-making character and career.

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Far too many of today’s millennials and Generation Z people, and even the younger Generation Xers, have imbibed the idiotic fiction that Reagan was just a trigger-happy cowboy who got lucky or an amiable dunce who play-acted while the Soviet empire collapsed under its own weight or an avatar of greed who neither cared about nor did much to help the poor. Even too many of today’s young conservatives, alas, pay only glancing tribute, and with more than a little ignorance, to the Reagan legacy. Too many believe Reagan’s skill was merely tactical, applied to a certain set of time-specific historical exigencies, rather than understanding that Reagan’s principles were timeless and still applicable today.

The movie Reagan corrects those miscomprehensions, and it does so in winsomely watchable fashion. Only someone with a barren soul could walk away from it without renewed hope, determination, and sense of purpose.