The message of ‘Vice’ is that Cheney does more than anyone before him to centralize American presidential power.”

gressive, a blank with a hint of a growl — and does it with a playful bravura that could hardly be more perfect.

It’s an impersonation, though one brought off on a virtuoso level of observation and exactitude. Bale, thanks to a stupendous job of prosthetic enhancement, disappears inside Cheney’s doughy armchair-warrior physique and deceptively innocuous balding head, but a puckish aura of Bale obsession shines through; he channels everything about Cheney that, in the Bush era, made him such a recessive and, in his way, magnetic figure of clandestine destruction. Bale’s Cheney, who has no problem stomping on the Constitution, behaves like an unhinged ruler, yet he does it with the officious calm of a civil servant. He’s a dictator giving orders and a pencil pusher following orders all in one body.

Mckay, who wrote and directed the film, sticks mostly to the facts, though he includes a sprinkling of satirical fantasy sequences, at one point presenting the Machiavellian pillow talk of Dick and his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), as a Shakespearean dialogue (the absurd joke of it is how untheatrical the actual Dick Cheney is), or rolling a fake set of closing credits just before Cheney makes his lunge for the vice presidency, giving the movie — and, by implication, America — the “happy ending” it might have had if Cheney had never assumed ultimate power.

Yet even when he’s playing it straight, which is most of the time, Mckay treats the movie as a slightly cracked burlesque. He turns history into a rollicking circus for liberals, inviting us to revel in Dick Cheney’s Greatest Hits of Infamy. “Vice” takes a lip-smacking vengeful glee in shining a light on all the dark things that Cheney did behind the scenes, from recklessly grabbing command of the military decision-making process just moments after the first attack on 9/11 (this included his wild order to shoot down any planes deemed suspicious) to lining up favors for his cronies in the oil industry to finding arcane “legal” ways to justify the trashing of the Geneva Convention. None of this will come as news to anyone who regularly consumes the front page of The New York Times. Nevertheless, the pop catharsis of “Vice,” to the extent that the movie provides one, is in seeing Dick Cheney throw his weight around, elbowing the wimpy, clueless George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) out of the way as he effectively assumes the role of president.

Along with all that ruthless power, the film includes the familiar Cheney nuggets and anecdotes: the hunting accident that he never apologized for (and that seemed to express his underlying violence); the Tao of his obsession with fly-fishing; the eager consumption of sweet rolls and other artery- clogging pleasures that Dick, with a wink, pretends are healthy; the serial heart attacks, which begin to arrive so regularly that they become the movie’s comic leitmotif, the punch line being that he takes them in stride, as if they were nothing more than muscle cramps, since you can’t kill a heart that’s already dead. The ultimate Cheney peccadillo may be the one hint of tenderness that actually nudges his ideology: Since his younger daughter, Mary (Alison Pill), is gay, he refuses on the campaign trail to make any overt statement against gay marriage. (Lynne, on the other hand, will prove that she has no problem throwing Mary under the bus.)

Yet as outrageous, and entertainingly horrible, as much of this is to watch, like a feature-length “Saturday Night Live” skit staged by the editors of Politico, none of it comes close to confronting the question that I went into a two-hour-and-12-minute movie about Dick Cheney in ardent hopes of getting an answer to. Namely: Who is Dick Cheney? How did he get to be the singular domineering bureaucrat-scoundrel he is? Why did he become so extreme? What is it that makes this scheming man, with the cold ticker that keeps on ticking, tick?

As you watch “Vice,” it’s not that the film comes up with an answer that’s overly glib or unconvincing; it doesn’t come up with much of an answer at all. The Dick Cheney of “Vice” looks and talks and operates just like the Cheney we’re familiar with, but in terms of his underlying spirit he might as well be a kabuki figure. The audience, in trying to suss out his motivation, let alone (gulp!) his inner life, is forced to fall back on abstractions like “greed” and “power” and “a flagrant contempt for democracy,” the sort of labels that add up to a liberal-left indictment but do little to explain, on a level of personal psychology, the crucial issue of how American rightwing patriotism got hijacked into something so corrupt. “Vice” is a preaching-to-the- choir movie, but its real limitation is that it refuses to grant its subject the full humanity that would deepen the argument against him into something more than a standard progressive fusillade.

What makes this flaw more curiously glaring is that the film opens with a portrait of the young Cheney as a total screw-up, a loser with no ambition. “Vice” starts in the early ’60s, when Cheney is a boozing-and-fighting lout (not so different from the collegiate George W. Bush) who gets himself kicked out of Yale and winds up working as a phone lineman. This does not exactly please his fiancée, Lynne, played by Adams as a straight shooter who thought Dick would take care of her. She’s disgusted by the fact that she’s set to marry a drunk, and Dick, who loves her devotedly, will do anything to get back in her good graces.

Yet even as the movie cuts to 1968, when Cheney has won a coveted spot in a congressional internship program in Washington, D.C., he doesn’t display any special qualities or ambition. He attaches himself to the conservative Illinois congressman Donald Rumsfeld, played with cartoon energy (though not a lot more) by Steve Carell. When the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds go out to dinner, and Donald is charmed as hell by Lynne’s rascal humor, that’s as close as we get to an explanation of Dick’s early rise.

He’s a man who likes being in the shadows; his first office is almost literally a closet, and he’s totally at home there. By the time Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency, Cheney and Rumsfeld