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The latest from so-called “values-based” distributor Angel Studios comes hot on the heels of their Fourth of July release “Young Washington,” which has drummed up nearly $47 million in theaters, and shares with that Great Man biopic the kind of textbook American patriotism that recalls, well, a certain kind of textbook. The story of how the 1986 Reykjavik Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way for the next year’s nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, it feels veritably designed (right down to its PG rating) to bore kids in history classrooms for generations to come. Adult audiences may be more willing when “The Brink of War” opens wide on Friday, but it’s doubtful they’ll be much more entertained.

“Young Washington” was stolidly old-fashioned, but still rousing in its gung-ho way. “The Brink of War” is a far dustier, more static affair: Its drama is all in two aging men seated at a table, arguing with each other over two days about nuclear disarmament in a remote Icelandic consulate building. That doesn’t have to be dull, of course, and if you squint a little at the screen, you can just about see the first-rate Broadway play that could emerge from this material — with no casting changes required — if the telling were just a little more tense, and the writing just a little more witty.

Gunn’s stiff script is attentive to the political dynamics and rhetorical thrust of the talks, and if its repeated emphasis on American honor, freedom and statesmanship makes for a somewhat pious exercise, you can’t deny the narrative stakes are high. The lines of conflict are established early and clearly: Where Gorbachev merely wants to discuss the banning of ballistic missiles, Reagan’s equal emphasis on human rights — in particular, the Soviet Union’s restrictions on Western travel for its citizens — complicates the discussion, while his insistence on pushing the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative continues to be a sticking point for the other side. (No surprise that the film glides over American political opposition to the latter proposal, unambiguously taking Reagan’s side on all fronts.)

What’s crucially lacking here is a particularly compelling sense of Reagan and Gorbachev as human characters. Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris, respectively, put forward solidly recognizable impressions of the men we knew from televised speeches and newscasts, but aren’t given many notes to play: The leaders’ inner lives are limited to standard-issue exchanges with their wives about professional duty and strain, which don’t vary much in tone from the pithy aphorisms they share with their right-hand men about diplomacy, or lack thereof. Even when religion comes up for discussion, it’s in predictably on-message Angel Studios fashion, as Reagan chides his atheist opponent for “denying [his people] the hereafter.” (“This is worse than propoganda!” protests one of Gorbachev’s aides; irony is not one of the film’s stronger suits.) At one point, Reagan spills some chicken salad sandwich filling on his shirt; it’s about the most unguarded moment we get.

Reagan also, naturally, gets the leading perspective, as well as the most generous sounding boards in the supporting ensemble: not just his wife Nancy (Hope Davis), who doesn’t travel to Reykjavik but provides repeated counsel over the phone, but his Secretary of State George Shultz (played with an air of gruff, salt-of-the-earth decency by J.K. Simmons), on hand to straighten out Team America’s priorities when the negotiations go awry.

Though the film’s lens is consistently ennobling — abetted by everything from DP Magdalena Górka’s sober official-portrait lighting to Austin Wintory’s overbearing score — Daniels gets Reagan’s combination of folksy squareness and flintier social conservatism. It’s a more substantial portrayal than Dennis Quaid’s in the tackily propagandistic 2024 biopic “Reagan,” though we’re still left with the impression that, in the ranks of American presidents on screen, the erstwhile movie star remains a less dynamic movie subject.

Harris, meanwhile, plays Gorbachev as an altogether more aloof, intractable and unknowable figure, which is precisely how the film wants it — though Branka Katić gives the canniest, funniest performance here as his watchful, image-conscious wife Raisa, here placed in a remote PR war with the U.S. First Lady where, yet again, America gets to come out on top. The film could use a few more such colorful secondary strands adjoining the main conflict, though one subplot involving a maybe-romance between two jaded journalists assigned to the summit is oddly framed and abruptly dropped.

Fairly deliberate for much of its two-hour running time, “The Brink of War” suddenly races toward a denouement in its final quarter-hour — somewhat eliding the fact that the Reykjavik Summit was, at least in the short term, a failure, with the two men’s talks ultimately stalling, and folding it into the clearer success story of the next year’s treaty. As the film’s single most lumpen line of dialogue reminds us at the close: “A journey of a thousand miles doesn’t begin with the most incredible arms deal in history — it begins with a single step.” Gunn’s film, on the other hand, is content to skip a few steps where necessary.