Peter Morgan’s pin-sharp drama about the television duel between Richard Nixon and David Frost charts an iconic moment of armchair history. Forty-five million people tuned in during the summer of 1977 to see if Britain’s glossy talk-show star could picklock a public apology from the disgraced ex-President. Ron Howard turns this contest between Michael Sheen’s playboy and Frank Langella’s marvellous old creep into one of the most compelling cinema waltzes I’ve yet seen.

The rumble is fuelled by vanity. This is the trial that Nixon never had. Langella’s stooped and baggy Nixon has spent three years in the wilderness tending his memoirs. He has stonewalled every journalist. His gamble to spill the beans to Frost in four rigidly demarcated interviews is a stroke of icy genius. If it goes well it could be a ticket back to Washington, a “way back to the sun”.

Sheen’s cocky Frost is already half-drunk on his own glamour. The first interview is car-crash television. Nixon taunts Frost with promises that there are “no holds barred”. Then he slips in a rabbit punch seconds before the cameras roll: “Did you fornicate last night?”. Frost retaliates with Cambodia, Vietnam, and “Why didn’t you burn the [Watergate] tapes?” But he can’t land a single glove.

Times Archive, 1977: Mr Nixon's interview opens old wounds

It was clear that David Frost let Mr Nixon escape in the interrogation

• Archive Topic: Watergate and the fall of Nixon

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Nixon rolls brilliantly with the punches. Sheen’s nightclubbing Frost is bewildered. “I’m in this for everything I’ve got got,” he wails to his girlfriend Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall) whom he handily snaffled on the first class flight to LA. “Why didn’t anyone stop me?”

Frost’s corner men — the veteran reporter (Oliver Platt), the veteran nutter (Sam Rockwell), and the veteran producer, John Burt (Matthew Macfadyen) — spend the entire film in comic poses of despair. In the opposite corner, Kevin Bacon’s chief of staff, Colonel Jack Brennan, doesn’t break sweat. “Long answers, control the space, don’t let him in,” he smugs.

The build-up to the final confrontation is an absolutely electric piece of cinema, not least because there are vertiginous moments where history is being reminted before your eyes. Does Nixon roll over? It’s a question that will launch a thousand festival debates. The surprise, perhaps, is how much sympathy Howard’s film generates for Langella’s broody, tight-arsed, antihero.

There’s a wonderfully seedy suspicion that Nixon may have sensed that his legacy would mean nothing without a confession: a realisation that to preserve the decent bits of his presidency he might have to fall on his sword.

This is the ingenious point of Morgan’s great script, and it is a horribly relevant tale.

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