Ron Howard directs this movie treatment of Peter Morgan’s smash-hit stage play about David Frost’s television interviews with former President Richard Nixon in 1977, the story of two famous people brought together by the ironies of fate, of politics, of celebrity, of male ego. Frost is played by Michael Sheen and Nixon by the massive, rumbling, fish-eyed Frank Langella. Kevin Bacon plays Nixon’s fiercely loyal aide Jack Brennan and Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt are Frost’s querulous American researchers.

In the mid-70s, Frost’s career was waning and he needed a real coup to put him back on top; Nixon was languishing in a post-impeachment twilight and desperate to overturn history’s dire verdict. If Frost landed a punch on Tricky Dicky that would set him up for life — but Nixon, that wily old operator, figured he would evade the punch and this servile Englishman would make him look good for posterity. The game was on. Then I saw this at the London film festival last year, I found myself disconcerted and underwhelmed. It never quite escapes its stage origins, and under a glitzy surface of period stylings doesn’t seem to have much to say, other than to reaffirm the truisms about very famous men being more human and vulnerable than we thought.

Having watched it again, I felt the same way as I had the first time around. There are some very nice performances, particularly from Langella, who enjoys himself hugely in this plum role and radiates a hypnotically conceited ex-Presidential manner. Rockwell and Platt have some great knockabout dialogue as the backstairs political guys, a double-act that might have amused Aaron Sorkin.

But the movie has some laborious faux-documentary-type “talking head” sections in which the main players — still played by the actors, but not apparently much aged reminisce blandly about the action: a gimmick that attempts to confer an aura of reality on the proceedings. And the characters keep giving speeches in which they explain what we are supposed to know and think about the main players. Rebecca Hall is wasted in the vapid role of Frost’s girlfriend Caroline, and the lead characters never meet on informal terms, never strike real sparks.