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Filled with more one-liners than a volume of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, it’s like a CliffNotes look at an important time in American history.

Dennis Quaid does his best to approximate Reagan’s voice and swagger, but he’s not given the scenes where he can do more than a quiet line reading. He’s shown from those early years in Hollywood to his waning days on the Reagan Ranch but none of it lights up – at least not in the way we remember it.

When Reagan debated Walter Mondale, he offered that clever response about age, but Quaid doesn’t get a chance to play the aftermath. (The real Mondale is smiling in the background.) Similarly, his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech could have used more context.

Perhaps what derails those moments is an overriding approach that finds Jon Voight as a Russian spy telling the Reagan story to a protégé. Like a TED talk, his hit-and-miss account includes film, slides, maps and charts, but they’re unnecessary. They’re also loaded with speculation.

Director Sean McNamara would have been wiser to extract a segment of Reagan’s life and tell that thoroughly. An “Oppenheimer” approach might have helped us understand the man a little more.

Using a number of performers with varying acting styles hinders the result, too. Penelope Ann Miller (as Nancy) appears to be in a different movie than Pat Boone (as a religious leader) or Dan Lauria (as Tip O’Neill). Lesley-Anne Down checks in as Margaret Thatcher, but she’s hardly a threat to Meryl Streep (who played her in “Iron Lady”) or Gillian Anderson (who had the honors in “The Crown”). There’s a quick segment with first wife Jane Wyman (Mina Suvari) but it’s not accorded enough attention to understand what impact that had on him. The Reagan children are MIA, for the most part – even though we remember the role they played in a number of aspects of the former president’s life.

While Quaid is good at the outdoorsy, rough-and-tumble Reagan, he’s not as comfortable in meetings, particularly when he’s squaring off with other world leaders. There are plenty of those encounters but most serve as markers in Voight’s timeline, not seminal moments in a presidency.

A section about his work as president of the Screen Actors Guild is interesting, but it isn’t fleshed out enough to understand how that step translated into governor of California.

McNamara handles the assassination attempt on Reagan with skill and taste but glosses over why John Hinckley was doing it.

A piecemeal approach is hardly the way to approach a politician who shifted the direction of his party. There’s a lot to unearth here but “Reagan” doesn’t want to be groundbreaking. It settles for stirring a little soil, not moving a lot of dirt.