Good decision-making is the very essence of politics. Yet as we see all around us, the virtue that the ancient writers called phronesis and which we sometimes call prudence is exceedingly rare. One way that the capacity for good judgment is formed is through the study of history; indeed, Thomas Hobbes argued that the teaching of prudence was the ultimate goal of all historical inquiry. For this reason, Darkest Hour, the new film about Winston Churchill’s first days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in World War II, is a significant historical film. By showing Churchill’s mastery of the political forces of the country in the spring of 1940, the film offers a marvelous illustration of that most necessary and rarest of political virtues.

To be sure, the movie will win few plaudits for historical accuracy. To take just the strangest example, the film depicts Churchill taking an impromptu ride on the London Underground at the time of the fall of France, querying stunned passengers about whether the country should fight on. The Churchill of Darkest Hour is a bit of a bumbling drunk, hampered by indecision and self-doubt. It does funnily and accurately depict his bumbling French in his meeting with French leaders and high military command before the fall of France.

Was Churchill nearly consumed by self-doubt? The evidence differs. As he later recalled, he went to bed on May 10, 1940, his first day as Prime Minister, “conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Though Gary Oldman generally does a very worthy Churchill, he captures little of that frenetic energy and intelligence that, even at age 65 in 1940, astonished friends and enemies alike.

The secret to Darkest Hour’s importance is its selection of a question at the heart of Churchill’s brilliance. One can imagine many different plot devices related to Churchill’s war, including the fall of France, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, D-Day, and many others. Indeed, these subjects have been endlessly treated in other works, and Darkest Hour touches on both the fall of France and Dunkirk. Yet the movie is ultimately about a political judgment that Churchill has to make, and the complicated factors he has to confront in making his judgment prevail.

The film revolves around the question of whether Britain should be open to negotiating an independent peace with Nazi Germany in May 1940, as all of Western Europe stands on the verge of collapse. Advancing the cause of peace negotiations are two members of Churchill’s war cabinet, Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) and, to a lesser extent, the ailing former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup). Churchill is adamantly opposed to their entreaties, insisting that Britain must fight on to the end. How could one negotiate with the maniacal tyrant Hitler and expect him to keep his side of the bargain?

In retrospect, Churchill might seem obviously right. Yet the film artfully offers a glimpse of the atmosphere of the time, when survival itself seemed at stake. In the days preceding the evacuation at Dunkirk in the last week of May 1940, Britain was faced with the potential capture or destruction of the whole British Expeditionary Force in France. America was sympathetic but noncommittal. Even if the troops in Northern France could be re-embarked, the German forces were superior by almost every quantitative measure. When behind the barrel of a gun, a negotiated peace can seem like an attractive option.

To its credit, Darkest Hour does not reduce Halifax and Chamberlain to stick figures. It gives their views an honest hearing. They argued that Churchill was in denial about the gravity of the British situation. Yes, they said, Hitler was our enemy, but he could be persuaded to tolerate an independent Britain and British Empire. Furthermore, what was the harm in trying? If Germany offered unacceptable terms, Britain could simply walk, and be no worse off. Though the movie doesn’t offer historical parallels for this side of the argument, Halifax, once an Oxford don, certainly thought in these terms. Sidmouth and Liverpool had signed the Treaty of Amiens with Napoleon in 1802, when he was master of all Europe. Yes, the peace collapsed, but hadn’t Britain gained precious time to regroup for the next round?

The arguments for an independent peace, in other words, had a certain rationale. It is indeed often forgotten, though never by Churchill himself, that Chamberlain’s appeasement policy was also based on a strategic calculus. Chamberlain had seen that Germany was a threat, and that its Luftwaffe was far superior to the Royal Air Force (RAF). Appeasement of Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938, he thought, could leave Britain valuable time to rearm. Whatever their flaws, Halifax and Chamberlain pursued the national interest as they saw it.

Darkest Hour thus shows us the complexity of Churchill’s task in May 1940. He had to outfox the formidable rivals within his war cabinet. He had to direct the war in France as Germany closed in on the Channel ports. And he had to make “never surrender” carry the day among the British public. Churchill responded marvelously, destroying the negotiated peace option through argument and maneuver. As for Churchill’s position, the film sums it up with his statement: “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.” Note that Churchill does not deny that you might have to reason with a tiger if you’re a safe distance away. Yet in Britain’s position at the time, negotiation would have equalled submission, slavery, and death.

The lynchpin of Halifax’s argument, by contrast, was that death was more likely if Britain chose to resist. To this claim, Churchill offers both a strategic and moral diagnosis, and offers a kind of moral psychology of national pride: “Nations that went down fighting rose again,” he tells his war cabinet, “but those who surrendered tamely were finished.” This sounds like death before dishonor, something Churchill did seem to believe. Yet he understood this in terms of national self-interest as well. If one consented to slavery, national death would follow anyway. If you have national dishonor, you will have national death. In fighting on in such circumstances, Britain was in a good position to gamble: it had nothing to lose, and a lot to gain.

The film also conveys Churchill’s subtle, important point that the British government could not even show a willingness to consider negotiation. This openness, Churchill knew, would so dispirit the troops, nation, and Empire that it could fatally damage the drive to continue the struggle. In the end, Churchill offered a better and more realistic assessment of the respective situations of Britain and Hitler, relying on his clear-eyed sense of the true moral and political stakes in the life of his nation.

Even if a bit too inclined to treat Churchill as an old bumbler, the film does let us see his masterful tactics in advancing his argument. We see him win over the formerly reluctant King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn). Most especially, we see how Churchill appealed directly to the people over the heads of a wavering elite, stoking their sense of patriotism and bucking up their willingness to fight on. He did this primarily through his speeches, which the film excerpts in part. Oldman’s wonderful delivery of these speeches may well represent his finest hour as an actor.

Churchill’s critics at the time saw something demagogic in his grand verbal and written appeals to the nation in the 1930s and during the war. They sometimes lacked detail or papered over potentially dispiriting or inconvenient facts. Yet this film reminds us that, in a democracy, the line between demagoguery and statesmanship is thin (though not indistinguishably so). Churchill successfully bound the “will of Parliament” with the “will of the nation,” putting Parliament under pressure to go along with his point of view and boosting the national appeal of the cause he knew to be the right one.

Some early reviewers of the film have seen connections between Churchill’s heroic anti-isolation stand and the contemporary situation of the UK. Just as Churchill rejected the argument for an “independent peace,” the argument goes, we should also reject Britain’s attempt to disengage from Europe today. Whatever the merits of Brexit, this argument strikes me as extremely forced. The film’s Churchill says not to negotiate with a tiger when your head is in its mouth. This would be apt today only if we considered Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to be tigers. British history extends further back than World War II, and the country has always wavered between strenuously engaging in the affairs of continental Europe and shielding itself from European troubles. World War II and Churchill, alas, do not offer a clear guide to the contemporary challenge.

Darkest Hour will likely be compared to Dunkirk, another 2017 movie that treats of these days, but from the perspective of the civilians who manned ships to carry troops stranded at Dunkirk back home. In a way, these two films make a perfect pair. Dunkirk is told from the perspective of the ordinary men and women engaged in the struggle, while Darkest Hour offers a political viewpoint from the very top. But perhaps the better companion of Darkest Hour is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), which is less a movie about the Civil War than a drama of political decision-making, as the President navigates the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery, and displays amazing prudence in holding the necessary parties together for the passage of the bill. Together, these films offer a compelling image of what statesmanship at the highest level could look like.

Churchill’s grandiose self-assessment happened to be true. His entire life had prepared him to lead Great Britain and the Allies at their most perilous moment. His preparation consisted of a remarkable mix of an illustrious family upbringing and an education in the ways of the world through school, sport, war, travel, technical experimentation, and involvement in politics. That kind of preparation and education frankly seems unavailable today, even if someone had Churchill’s natural gifts. Yet Churchill’s example shows us how much we lack—and the perception of a lack is the beginning of wisdom.