Beware of idealists making movies about American politics. They're always out to sell you something, but they are absolutely, indignantly certain that they're up to no such thing—they just wanna show you the truth, man. The best movies about American politics—and I think you'd have to go a long, long way to even touch the hem of the garment of Otto Preminger's 1962 Advise and Consent—are made by cold-eyed skeptics who prefer to concentrate on the venalities behind their statesmen's political agendas rather than on the agendas themselves. Writer-director Rod Lurie's The Contender, on the other hand, is constantly threatening to whip out its agenda, and Lurie's setup is too ripe for it. His sophomore effort tells the story of a vice-presidential nominee (for an incumbent prez, played by Jeff Bridges, whose veep has just croaked) who is perfect in just about every respect—brilliant, principled, stable, appealing, etc. What makes this candidate truly extraordinary is what also makes her (oh, jeez, did I say her? I gave it away; well, now that that's done, she's played by Joan Allen) problematic. The very fact that she's a woman is enough to thoroughly put off the (right-wing, in case you couldn't guess) congressman (Gary Oldman) who's heading up the committee overseeing her appointment. At which point some old, alleged footage of the would-be veep pleasuring some frat boys surfaces and, voilà, the scintillating question as to whether one's personal (read: sex) life is relevant to one's fitness to lead our nation rears its ugly head.

I won't reveal Lurie's answer, but you can bet he's got a very definite one. Fortunately, the auteur is canny enough to stoke his vehicle with plenty of juicy, smoke-filled-room-type stuff before sucker-punching you with his message, after which he goes straight for your kidney (well, at least that's where I felt it) with a dedicatory title card: "For Our Daughters," it reads. Yeesh. Still, that sort of thing goes over very well in Hollywood, where the most carnivorous, crass, aesthetically impoverished players regularly drop the phrase "I have a daughter, you know" with an air that suggests that said fact qualifies them for canonization. But I digress.

The Contender winds up being very entertaining in spite of—or who knows, maybe because of—its varied irritants. Onetime movie critic Lurie is really eager to assure you that he Knows His Stuff; at one point he actually has a character start a sentence, "You remember what Ben Franklin said about the vice-presidency?" Why, no, Rod, I don't, but I think I'm about to find out. And so on. If one isn't paying too much attention at the beginning, it's conceivable that the picture's stunningly meretricious third-act plot twist might come as a surprise; at any rate, it is quite ballsy in a silly way. Where The Contender doesn't err at all is in the acting department.

Did I say before that Richard Gere has aged better than any actor of his generation? Hmm, I might have meant Jeff Bridges. Except that Bridges has always been great. His character as written is literally two-dimensional: one, a thoroughly decent politician and man who also happens to be, two, an incredibly ruthless and savvy tactician. Bridges's remarkable performance does more than connect the dots between those points; it creates a fully fleshed-out portrait of the kind of person who's utterly comfortable with wielding massive power. That's a difficult job in any event, but it's all the more dazzling in the wake of his portrayal of a completely opposite type in The Big Lebowski. Oldman is reliably blood-curdling as the serpentine villain (see this month's article, Strange Bedfellows, to get the backstory on that), his performance a feast of bizarrely sprung rhythms. And Allen is so stalwart as the too-good-for-politics title character that she brings to mind the title of another Preminger picture, one that Lurie's film doesn't try to measure up to: Saint Joan.