Movies likes “Reagan,” a new screen hagiography of actor turned politician and conservative icon Ronald Reagan, exist in the sort of alternative reality that George Orwell warned us about.

It’s a sanitized, whitewashed love letter to “The Man who Brought Down the Soviet Union,” President “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Serious scholarship on Reagan is thin, seemingly by fiat, and biographies that seek to lay out a “warts and all” portrait of the beloved but scandalized idealogue whose missteps were as epic as his achievements, and whose dementia was undeniable years before he left office, are shouted down by zealots who still insist St. Ron should be added to Mount Rushmore.

One respected biographer apologized for reporting “There is no ‘there’ there” in the actor’s life, an empty suit/figurehead, a man of all-surface traits, an image with narrow focus and whose infamous napping, insensititivity, inattention to details and disregard for the law were papered over with scripted jokes and anecdotes he repeated for decades.

That critical view of Reagan during his presidency was memorably sent-up by “Saturday Night Live,” with Dan Aykroyd playing Reagan as a micromanaging “mastermind,” flying in the face of the widely reported truth of the day.

And when CBS tried to make a mini-series about “The Reagans,” conservatives attacked it over its depiction of his incompetent response to the AIDS crisis. The series was compromised, with any attempt at a warts and all” portrait watered down, and eventually dumped onto paid cable.

For conservatives, Reagan has become Muhammad, the Prophet whose name no non-believer ever dare utter.

But that’s the “Reagan” of this new movie, a flattering-to-the-point-of-fawning rewriting of history from the director of “Soul Surfer” and starring Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller, with Oscar-winner-turned-crank Jon Voight and assorted other lesser lights of conservative activist cinema (Kevin Sorbo, Robert Davi).

While it’s useful in reminding us of a time when Republicans made Soviet-hating/Russia-mistrusting their brand, their idealogy and their passion, long before taking them on as political allies and election collaboraters, “Reagan” is a bad movie — a choppy spin on “Reagan’s Greatest Hits,” a highlight reel that doesn’t so much get us closer to the man as serve up warmed-over agitprop that faithful want to believe about him.

Howard Klausner’s script, based on a literary hagiography “The Crusader” by Paul Kengor (Try and find a serious review of that. Good luck.), bounces back and forth in time, from childhood and Hollywood Screen Actor’s Guild activism to the politics that replaced the faded film career.

It’s a story framed by the view his “enemies” allegedly take of Reagan, a “Patton” device of having an aged Russian expert (Russian-accented Voight) explain to a young Putin acolyte the man who did so much harm to “the Motherland,” the U.S. president who “denied us (Russia) our rightful place in the world.”

Voight’s retired comrade claims the KGB were warily watching Reagan from the 1940s, notes how studio chief Harry Warner (Kevin Dillon) tried to enlist Reagan near his peak stardom to “break” the unions, and over-simplifies the union climate of 1945 before noting Reagan became an FBI informant back then.

We track a marriage to Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari) whom the film smears by claiming she dismissed Reagan’s union activities, and who finally split from his as his war-augmented career (his poor eyesight kept him from combat service, not mentioned) went down the toilet after VJ Day.

And we see the odd “courtship” of Nancy Davis (Miller), who needs Reagan’s help escaping the Hollywood Blacklist, which he turns into a quid pro quo dinner and relationship that she partnered all the way to the White House.

“Reagan” isn’t without humor, capturing the “career-ending” Vegas stage act that saw him shilling for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer while glossing past the TV series that kept him relevent. And the only way to regard the death throes of the Soviet “Evil Empire,” with its succession of very old, sick comrades dying off as Reagan was trying to “bankrupt” them by starting a new arms race is in a comical montage of funerals.

The anecdote-centered portrait here never gets past the Aykroyd spin of Reagan as “mastermind” and “prophet” who oversaw America’s victory in the Cold War. It ignores his singularly disastrous energy policites, AIDS, union-busting and the media deregulation and tax “reforms” that battered the middle and working classes while ensuring they’d be bombarded with “news” that flattered their prejudices. It rewrites his landslide re-election by overplaying the set-up “my opponent’s inexperience” scripted quip he delivered against Walter Mondale in a debate.

The characters portrayed here are whittled down to caricatures of Reagan staff, confidantes and Soviet ogres. Lesley Anne Down plays Margaret Thatcher, with Dan Hedaya a gregarious “fellow Irishman” Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and a look-alike is glimpsed as Gen. Colin Powell, because efforts to whitewash Reagan’s attitudes on race was a non-starter for true believers.

Miller’s Nancy has more shades, suggesting the careerist of Nancy “rumors,” a devoted defender of her husband’s image and health, with nary a hint of her AIDS hypocrisy (the Reagans didn’t acknowledge the peril until Hollywood friends started dying) or weird obsession with astrology.

Quaid’s impersonation is solid, and makes one wish he’d been given the chance to take on a more nuanced version of the title character. He could easily flesh-out a flawed and ambitious, embittered and opportunistic Reagan, an intellectually-limited political puppet of Big Oil and the super rich, but also a canny political operator who used humor and feigned folksiness — as fake as his dyed hair — to turn himself into “The Teflon President,” one whose myriad scandals were easy for his devoted fans to dismiss.

We may never get that movie, as no studio or streaming service seems motivated to attempt it and endure the abuse of true believers who prefer the myth to the real man. And while movies that scrub off all his flaws may merit plenty of attention in Right Wing “alternate” reality, they do real history and those who learn from it no favors.

Rating: PG-13, violent content and smoking

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight, Robert Davi, Kevin Sorbo, Kevin Dillon, C. Thomas Howell and Mena Suvari

Credits: Directed by Sean McNamara, scripted Howard Klausner, based on “The Crusader” book by Paul Kengor. A Showbiz release.

Running time: 2:15