“Frost/Nixon” is a fictionalized version of the 1977 interviews between President Richard Nixon and performer David Frost, of “That Was the Week That Was” and “The Frost Report,” (imagine “Saturday Night Live” as funny as “The Daily Show”).

Now, Nixon quit rather than be thrown out on his respectable Republican cloth coat for getting caught spying and telling the FBI to stop investigating so close to him. “The real story,” as Hunter S. Thompson wrote, of Watergate, “is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery.” The movie (in clunky fake documentary style) wants us to think that he was desperate to ‘fess up about how treacherous. The French version of the movie is so maudlin as to call the movie “Frost/Nixon: The Hour of Truth.”

And desperate enough to drunk-dial. After three softball chats (most of the film’s fire comes from gorgeous-when-he-glares Sam Rockwell, as researcher James Reston) Nixon (played by Frank Langella) calls Frost. It’s late and Nixon seems to have been listening to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” He tells Frost, “We still feel like … the loser they told us we were — a hundred times. The smart-asses at college. … The people whose respect we really wanted.”

The apology comes in the last interview. Langella’s face fills the screen, ticking through seconds of remorse, self-loathing, justification, fear and hatred the way Bugs Bunny turns plaid when nauseated. (Langella was a brilliant pick for this fictional Nixon, having perfected the loathable old man as Clare Quilty in the 1997 version of “Lolita”) “I let them down,” Nixon admits. “I let the country down.”

Problem is, in the real interviews, “there are self-exculpatory escape clauses in Nixon’s every interminable, roundabout utterance,” to quote NPR. There were no confessional, middle-of-the-night drunk-dials. Nixon walked away hundreds of thousands of dollars richer and probably slept like a kitten the rest of his life. Writer Peter Morgan is at work on another political fanfic which ickily promises “A dramatization … of former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair’s relationships with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.” That, and “Frost/Nixon,” is political fantasy no more apt than “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin.”

Nixon might not seem to have much in common with fictional D-list wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, the main character in “The Wrestler” but like politics, wrestling has an above-average rate of ravaging its hardcore participants. The costumes may be lamer (19th century politician James Hamilton Lewis is the top Google result for “best dressed politician”) but all they’re missing in the political ring is the folding chairs.

Life is certainly catching up to Mickey Rourke’s Ram — he’s short on his single-wide rent, his spray tan doesn’t match his hearing aid, his grown daughter is estranged, he needs more hours at his supermarket day job and years of steroids and coke haven’t been kind to his heart. He yearns — somewhat — to escape from the spotlight with a fed-up stripper (played by Marisa Tomei). But when Ram leaves the ring, pats his opponents on the back for good choreography and strips off the sequin capri pants, the color drains and the world is a grouchy lady who wants an exact pound of German potato salad from the deli boy.

Ram gets to be a hero because the lies of his profession are benign to its audience. And not hero in the 9/11 miracle-performing variety. Hero in the exhausted, hard-living sense Rourke was too polished to pull off in the Charles Bukowski bio-flop “Barfly” way back when. Hero in the sense of a sleep-when-you’re-dead man whose story deserves to be told, long after he’s gone, because he was willing to go out with a Ram Jam and not a whimper.

Given these ingredients, the movie has guts to do what it did with them. I bet even Bukowski would agree.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.