Christian Bale nails it as Dick Cheney in ‘Vice,' but the rest of the movie is an absurd mess

Christian Bale brings his “A” game, his “Z” game and everything in between to “Vice,” in which he inhabits former Vice President Dick Cheney down to his distinctive, sideways grimace and wheezily stentorian inhalations - vocal stylings that helped forge Cheney’s instantly recognizable image as the consummate Washington player.

Written and directed by Adam McKay, “Vice” hews to roughly the same structure as “The Big Short,” McKay’s 2015 movie about the 2008 financial meltdown.

“Vice” benefits from a more linear narrative, plotting the rise of Cheney from a misdirected young man in Wyoming to one of the most notorious gray eminences in American politics. But it has the same frenetic, absurdist energy that propelled “The Big Short,” and in this case the form feels even more queasily at odds with the content.

As a central character, Cheney is undeniably rich. As “Vice” gets underway, he’s a classic American lost boy, drinking and carousing until his fiancee Lynne (a blonde-bewigged Amy Adams) reads him the riot act: Get your act together, son, or this marriage is over before it begins. Thus is introduced one of McKay’s most insistent thematic threads in “Vice,” which portrays Lynne Cheney not just as a smart, sharp-eyed author and historian in her own right, but as the schemingly ambitious Lady Macbeth behind her husband’s rise.

That ascent, “Vice” explains, began in earnest when Cheney was a congressional intern and met the man who would seal and accelerate his fate: Donald Rumsfeld, played by Steve Carell.

It’s not conservative ideals but the raw pursuit of power that drives Cheney in “Vice,” which centers on Cheney’s most far-reaching role, that of vice president to George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell). As with “The Big Short,” mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to how surprising or entertaining “Vice” is, beyond the madcap flourishes of its own self-conscious style. Strip away the gimmicks, and what may seem exhilaratingly brash begins to look glib, opportunistic and relatively tame.