Many Americans aren’t old enough to have adult memories of President Ronald Reagan. Fewer still have a personal understanding of the nature and origins of the Cold War — a great power competition between the free West, led by America, and the Soviet bloc that had both a military and an ideological component.

“Reagan,” starring a comfortably convincing Dennis Quaid in the title role, shines as a biopic and a valuable lesson in evil as an organizing principle. The genius of “Reagan” the film and Reagan the man is that both grasp the elemental nature of evil and the moral courage and clarity required to confront it if there is to be any hope of victory.

This is especially true today as history did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather, history took a nasty turn down the bloody lane of radical Islamic terror, distracting us from a new evil, organized along Nazi lines in its lust for control on a core of racial superiority in the form of the Chinese Communist Party.

In the film, major players in Reagan’s life are a veritable who’s who of non-leftist Hollywood: Kevin Sorbo as Reagan’s childhood pastor; Robert Davi as Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (the prosthetic eyebrows must have weighed a pound); Nick Searcy as James Baker; and Jon Voight as old KGB analyst Viktor Petrovich.

Voight’s Russian character is essential to the telling of the story, and Voight brings everything to the effort. Voight’s analyst sees in Reagan an elemental threat to the Soviet Union, but he’s powerless to convince the sclerotic leadership of that fading empire to do anything about it. He is grudging in his admiration for his old enemy, Reagan. He serves as the film’s narrator, explaining to an up-and-coming Russian politician how Reagan brought........

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