It’s a paradox that the only movie star to reach the White House, President Reagan, always proves too large for the confines of the silver screen. Hollywood often deals with this by reducing the Gipper to a caricature. “Reagan” takes the opposite tack. It dares, as First Lady Nancy says in the film, to “let Ronnie be Ronnie.”

Some presidents have props — pince-nez, a beard, a stovepipe hat — that helps actors get into character. Without any of these, Mr. Quaid had to portray a subject who was a familiar fixture for eight decades. Movies, TV, commercials, ads for Chesterfield cigarettes, governor, president. Reagan was everywhere.

I braced for Mr. Quaid to fall short, but he surpassed my expectations. With only the familiar brown pompadour that Reagan carried from his days as a lifeguard into retirement, he undersells little Reagan ticks like saying, “Well,” and never drifts into parody.

Mr. Quaid delivers iconic lines with humor and gravity appropriate to the original moments. When he issues Reagan’s challenge to the Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, at West Berlin, to “Tear down this wall,” he bites off each word.

The reason for the intensity is shown in the film. Advisors kept removing the confrontational lines from Reagan’s speeches. Fellow historians might wish the film dwelled on those moments, but good history isn’t always good storytelling. “Reagan” accepts this rather than try to capture each one in detail.

Historical fiction, when done well, encourages us to seek out the true story. “Reagan” does this. It portrays a beloved American icon, demonstrating to a new generation why Californians spontaneously lined the roads as his hearse passed. In his last election, he’d won 49 of the 50 states.

Showing East Germans daring to express joy on their side of the wall as they listened to the speech does more than any dialogue could. The transformational impact of the “words” Reagan promised to use as weapons in “the biggest war of the 20th Century” is on full display.

The Wall line was a shot across the Kremlin’s bow, one heard around the world. “Way to go, Cowboy,” the Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, remarks watching from 10 Downing Street. It’s an insult that Reagan shrugs off with what the Soviets call a “gentle smile that never left his face,” remarking that he’s “been called worse.”

Thatcher’s support, along with that of allies from Japan to the Vatican, is touched upon, again without bogging down or lingering. The love story with Mrs. Reagan is the only relationship explored in depth. Played to perfection by Penelope Ann Miller, we see through his eyes the woman he always said could couldn’t imagine life without.

Hollywood, which likes its two-dimensional villains, doesn’t portray opponents like the Democratic Speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, and Gorbachev, with kindness. “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time,” Reagan says, “is an 80 percent friend and not a 20 percent enemy.”

Reagan’s Christian faith is shown informing how he deals with everyone from student protestors to the Soviets. Some critics roll their eyes, but it’s accurate. So are shining moments like Reagan insisting Black players on his football team travel to an away game, billeting them at his brother’s house because no hotels will welcome them.

My only quibble with the film is the choice to tell the story through voiceovers by a former Soviet bureaucrat, performed by John Voight. This composite character, like the one in the panned Edmund Morris biography, “Dutch,” is another surrender to the reality that Reagan’s life had too many big set pieces to cover in a conventional plot.

The national view of any American president rises and falls over time. With “Reagan,” the 40th president’s reputation is now on the upswing. “I know that for America,” Mr. Quaid says, performing Reagan’s letter announcing his Alzheimer’s Disease, “there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

Such sunny optimism was dismissed as pollyannaish in a cynical age much like our own. Yet, like Reagan himself, it’s in the best tradition of America. It is a spirit that restored national pride, ended the specter of nuclear annihilation, and restored prosperity at a time of President Carter’s “crisis of confidence.”

As its subject did in life, “Reagan” cries out to our better angels. It’s beating box office expectations by challenging us to fight battles with words not war, with ideas not ICBMs. It invites us to ask, as Lincoln did, “Do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?” and to pursue peace as the ultimate destiny of man on earth.