There are two stage-minded creators at work in Charlie Wilson’s War: director Mike Nichols (Closer, Angels in America) and writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Sports Night, A Few Good Men), but you’d have to be blind and deaf not to notice them. Both have a very theatrical sense of both drama and comedy, and at points you’re almost preparing yourself to wipe away a bit of Tom Hanks’s love sweat. The cadence of the film is deliberate and synthetic; it’s as if Nichols and Sorkin are asking you to pay attention to the story’s artifice.

But, this time at least, it works. Maybe it’s because Charlie Wilson himself shares the movie’s sensibilities: he’s a scoundrel, a charmer and a cheat, but somewhere in that boozing and womanizing heart is a man who believes in something, earnestly and not without a touch of naiveté. He’s a rake, but he’s your rake. As played by Tom Hanks, he’s all these things and not an inch more, but the spell works even in spite of itself. You’re charmed, even if you know better.

So what is it the Texas congressman believes in, when he’s not hot-tubbing with strippers in Vegas? He believes in the importance of keeping the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and an informational trip (as well as dalliances with an ultra-rich utra-conservative Houstonite Joanne Herring, played by Julia Roberts in a role that personifies the maxim “a little goes a long way”) gives Wilson a bit of the evangelical fire. If he can convince his fellow Congressmen to send some weaponry, funding, and CIA training officers to the brave Mujahideen in Afghanistan, then the Soviets might lose their will to expand further into Europe. Since any open confrontation between the United States and the USSR – or even, for that matter, any open acknowledgment of supporting someone defying the USSR – would lead to outright world war, Wilson has to be extra clever about helping out the Afghani people.

Which gives us Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Gust Avrakotos, a CIA lifer who dresses like someone out of central casting, 1977. His opening scene shows us he is 1) unconventional in approach, 2) disapproving of bureaucracy, 3) unafraid of authority, and 4) just wants to get the job done, in what is one of the movie’s two most nakedly Sorkin-esque displays of theatrical bravado. Avrakotos is Wilson’s eventual ally and entry point into the murky world of arms dealing. (Their meeting at Wilson’s office is the other nakedly Sorkin moment.) These are men who get things done.

The surprise is how procedural Charlie Wilson’s War is. There’s not a lot of war footage, and that’s a good thing, because those are invariably the weakest in the film, invoking the kind of physical symbolism that only a Drama professor could love. The opening title sequence, featuring a Muslim man praying in silhouette before standing and firing a missile, saw me very seriously contemplating leaving right then and there. Surely nothing good could come from this.

But, as I say, it’s a procedural. And a pretty interesting one at that. All focus is on Wilson, on who he has to deal with and what he has to learn to see the right weapons make it into the right hands. If there’s a flaw in this technique it’s in how little we’re shown the face of suffering; for Wilson, it’s all backroom deals with Pakistani presidents, elite oil baron conservatives, and shady CIA prodigies. Looming on the horizon, too, is the knowledge of what funding and training so many Afghani militants will eventually lead to. (Hint: 9/11.) Thankfully, Nichols and Sorkin don’t skip this lesson about the consequences of war. Who was it that said happy endings are just stories that haven’t finished yet?

Given the artifice of Sorkin and Nichols’ delivery, it’s impossible for Charlie Wilson’s War to be anything more than “interesting.” There’s no visceral impact, no tug at your gut, no reason to care beyond the witty verbiage and not-altogether-superficial history lesson. Hanks, Hoffman, and Roberts turn in fine performances, but they are indeed performances, with Hanks the most natural of the three. A more nuanced and organic approach may have yielded a more powerful story, but if Charlie Wilson’s War is to believed, there is nothing particularly nuanced about Charlie Wilson. He is who he is, and so is his movie.