WASHINGTON – Director Doug Liman has felt the moral presence of his late father more keenly than usual this year.

Liman, whose credits include “The Bourne Identity” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” makes his first foray into fact-based drama this fall with a new film, “Fair Game” – the story of former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson; his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson; and the events of 2003, when her identity as a CIA operative was leaked after her husband wrote an op-ed criticizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

While making “Fair Game,” Liman said, he was acutely aware of how his father, Arthur – who served as chief counsel for the Senate committee formed to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal – felt about politically inspired stories, especially Oliver Stone’s “JFK.”

In that 1991 film, Stone mixed archival material, re-enactment, conspiratorial speculation and outright fantasy to cast doubt on the Warren Commission’s conclusions about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Nearly two decades later, as “Fair Game” was about to make its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Liman vividly recalled his father’s reaction to “JFK” as “an abdication of Oliver Stone’s responsibility as a filmmaker.” In dramatizing recent, politically charged events in “Fair Game,” Liman said, “I definitely felt the pressure of my father every step of the way.”

No doubt that pressure will intensify when “Fair Game” arrives in theaters in November, as Washington audiences charge up their BlackBerrys and prepare to truth-squad the movie’s tiniest details. (The film stars Naomi Watts and Sean Penn as Valerie and Joe Wilson.)

They’ll certainly apply the same scrutiny to “Casino Jack,” George Hickenlooper’s upcoming film starring Kevin Spacey as disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and, further down the road, Aaron Sorkin’s proposed movie about John Edwards.

As dramatizations of Washington stories, these projects join a special subset of politically oriented movies – including “Breach,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Thirteen Days” and Stone’s “Nixon” and “W.” – that are received with a combination of relish and apprehension by Washington-area filmgoers, many of whom are likely to have witnessed the events onscreen firsthand. Much as people in Detroit critique movies about carmaking, or lion tamers pick apart movies about the circus, political insiders see movies about true events in Washington as twofold entertainments, first in the theaters and later during the parlor game of spot-the-error (or hear-the-ax-grinding).

But every once in a while, a film survives the vetting and emerges as a tacitly approved version of true events – an interpretive history far more enduring and powerful than even the most rigorously researched, authoritative text. In the annals of Washington’s most sacred narratives, none is more venerated than “All the President’s Men,” which since its release in 1976 has held up not only as a taut, well-made thriller but as the record itself of the Watergate scandal that transpired four years earlier. Among filmmakers, “All the President’s Men” is considered the ur-text of fact-based political drama; Peter Morgan, who wrote “The Queen” and “Frost/Nixon,” calls it “a masterpiece.”

It barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue – “Follow the money” – was never spoken in real life. According to Bob Woodward, whose source Deep Throat utters the deathless line in the film, the quote aptly captures everything his source, FBI associate director Mark Felt, was telling him at the time.

“It all condensed down to that,” Woodward says. Even the most scrupulously footnoted book, he adds, can’t be 100 percent accurate. “No matter how well reported or carefully done, it’s not an engineer’s drawing of what happened.”

Creative license

Myth or reality? That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling. Never has the political establishment been as unsettled as in 1991, when “JFK” hit the screen.

In bold, bravura strokes, the film turned settled history on its ear, suggesting that a malign conspiracy of political, criminal and corporate interests killed John F. Kennedy in 1963. While many viewers saw “JFK” as a technically brilliant, expressionistic portrait of generational angst and American paranoid style, just as many observers were alarmed that, precisely because the film was so accomplished, Stone’s version of history would come to be accepted as fact.

Subsequently, Stone went on to make “Nixon,” a Shakespearean portrait of the brooding former president and, more recently, “W.,” about George W. Bush, both of which took their own liberties with imagined episodes and dialogue. But by then, viewers were more familiar with Stone’s authorial style, which favors bright lines and (often wholly imagined) emblematic scenes over messier shades of gray.

“It’s a movie,” Stone said in a recent telephone conversation. “You’ve got to make it fun. You’ve got to make it exciting.” As for viewers who can’t abide his techniques, Stone says, “there are literal people, and they’ll never get it. They’ll never, ever get it. As long as a movie is fun, it’s exciting and it doesn’t have Iranian subtitles, it’s OK.

“And by the way,” the director added puckishly, “ ‘JFK’ is right.” (Most Americans would agree on one of the movie’s angles at least: Polling since “JFK’s” release suggests that between 70 percent and 80 percent of respondents believe that more than one gunman killed Kennedy, a percentage that has remained relatively consistent since the 1980s.)

You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth. If we can stipulate Nixon probably never stood in front of a portrait of John F. Kennedy and said, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are” – as he does in “Nixon” – that tableau still encapsulates volumes about what motivated, tortured and finally undermined a brilliant and complex man.

Which movie is true, “All the President’s Men” or “Nixon”? Both, in important ways – one conveying not just events but a zeitgeist, the other in creating vivid psychological tone. But the more useful question may be how filmgoers can most profitably encounter movies that, while not pure fact, aren’t pure fiction, either.

Sorkin, who wrote “Charlie Wilson’s War” and plans to make his directorial debut with the adaptation of “The Politician,” Edwards aide Andrew Young’s book about his former boss, called nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread” in an e-mail. “When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ ” he said, “they should look at it the way they’d look at a painting and not a photograph. Picasso’s subjects probably didn’t have three eyes. There was no one named Falstaff in the court of Henry IV.”

But the artist has his own obligations, according to Sorkin, who follows his own set of best practices in dramatizing real-life events.

“When you’re writing nonfiction drama, you’ve got two important things in your hands – history and somebody’s life,” he says. “So ... first do no harm. I would never want to unfairly defame anyone (either the moral or the legal definition) and while sometimes I’m willing to conflate time, create composite characters or have a scene take place in an office when it really took place in a living room, I wouldn’t change or invent a fact that I felt fundamentally lied about something significant.”

As long as dramatists seek to make protagonists out of mere humans – to reduce their tangled webs of contradictions, complexities and banalities to a set of single-minded motivations and fatal flaws – audiences will need to approach these narratives with a blend of sophistication and skepticism. But maybe the best way to understand these films isn’t as narrative at all, but an experience akin to ritual.

When religious pilgrims travel to the sacred sites of the Holy Land, for example, the locations they visit often aren’t the literal places where a biblical figure was born or baptized. Instead, they’re the sites that, through centuries of use and shared meaning, have become infused with a spiritual reality all their own.

Thus, the movies about Washington that get the right stuff right – or get some stuff wrong but in the right way – become their own form of consensus history. “Follow the money,” then, assumes its own totemic truth. Ratified through repeated viewings in theaters, on Netflix and beyond, these films become a mutual exercise in creating a usable past. We watch them to be entertained, surely, and maybe educated. But we keep watching them in order to remember.