Well, finally the American film industry has done it. At last, there’s a movie about American foreign policies and programs in the Middle East and West Asia, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that Americans can feel good about.

Charlie Wilson’s War gives moviegoers a hero, a guy who strives to achieve fine ends in that region of the world, but one with distinctively human dimensions, a guy who knows how to have fun when he’s not helping to effect great international goals. As the New York Times’ A.O. Scott put it, in a typical response, it stands “in welcome contrast to the plodding, somber earnestness of some recent movies I will tactfully refrain from naming.”

Here, here, and about time! (No wonder those other somber war movies are tanking.)

You can’t accuse director Mike Nichols and writer Aaron Sorkin of being plodding. They’ve packaged and showcased a more-or-less real-life character, foibles, failings, lubricious excesses and all. Does he overindulge in alcohol and other less legal chemicals? As impersonated by Tom Hanks, he’s a charmingly, harmlessly roguish guy. And nobody’s fool. He knows how to get things done when the chips are down, thank goodness.

At least, that’s the movie’s version. In Nichols and Sorkin’s telling (based rather selectively on the late George Crile’s biography of the same title), Charlie Wilson, congressional representative from Texas’ Second District, spearheaded an effort to obtain American financing for the Afghan forces fighting against the Soviet Union’s occupation of their country in the 1980s. The movie depicts good old Charlie as instrumental in defeating the Russians, forcing their withdrawal from Afghanistan and, therefore, also helping to cause the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War. Hey, not bad, right? And a hell of a story. Hold that thought.

Nichols and Sorkin’s smart, knowing, often comedic take on the events surrounding Wilson’s heroic efforts is undeniably amusing and deftly managed. Their movie glides, often merrily, along the corridors and into the offices of Washington power holders. It also takes us into a couple of boudoirs, a hot tub and a crucial belly dance in Egypt, but it’s less interested in these entertainingly lubricous sidelights than the story of how Charlie, a veteran pol whose previous chief legislative achievement had been getting re-elected five times, helped save the Afghan resistance from annihilation.

This guy may be a party animal, but he’s also a shrewd cookie who’s picked up a few chits during his career. At one point he tells a staffer who’s concerned about constituent opinion that “constituents don’t elect candidates; contributors do.” The filmmakers have adopted a posture of waggish irreverence toward the Washington power structure, but it’s in the service of an underlying serious message. In their version, he’s brought on board the aid-to-Afghanistan campaign by Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), an outlandishly conceived and played rich, rightist, rigidly Christian Houston socialite and former beauty queen. She shares her favors with Charlie and gives him his marching orders. He’s to use his position on the House defense appropriations subcommittee to get money for those valiant anti-Communist freedom fighters. Since Charlie is already interested in them—although he certainly doesn’t share Herring’s religious motivation—it’s not a hard sell.

He also makes common cause with a vulgarly, comically insubordinate C.I.A. agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who’s disgusted by the agency’s tepid, bean-counting response to the Soviet invasion.

The now retired Wilson says that the movie goes easy on him in its portrayal of his peccadillos and high (and low) jinks, but it gives him a much more important record purging than that. The filmmakers rely on potted play history, with a pungent ideological infusion.

The real Wilson’s boots are covered in clay and blood. He and his war wrought disastrous consequences that still resonate dangerously today. A freelance jihadist and soi-disant religious authority named Osama bin Laden got his anti-Western start in that war, with American assistance. The US funding largely went to Islamist zealots, and one brutally ambitious warlord who continues to challenge the sway of the American-supported elected government in Afghanistan. Then there are the Taliban forces that US and NATO troops are still battling for control of the country in a five-year-old war, and who rose to prominence fighting the Russians with our weaponry and dollars. Hundreds of thousands of civilians suffered and tens of thousands perished in consequence of Charlie’s war. (It wasn’t really his. The movie exaggerates his importance.) When Timesman Scott wrote that Charlie Wilson’s War provides “a bracing, cheering, present-day moral…a reminder that high principles are not incompatible with the pleasure principle,” he’s suffering from historical amnesia, or spinning.

A delusional travesty.

Wilson’s efforts were fueled by old-fashioned reckless American anti-communism. He went from helping to arm Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to helping arm militant Islamists who didn’t relinquish their disdain for us while accepting the aid.

The Hollywood liberals responsible for Charlie Wilson’s War, principally Hanks, who pursued the film rights to Crile’s book, may not have intended the nasty, recrudescent Cold War ethos their movie conveys, but, in any event, their effort to leaven the subject with ribaldry and wit doesn’t seem to be succeeding.

The movie’s performance at the box office last week was anemic. Moviegoers aren’t buying into it.