Dressing up the march toward war in the heightened-mundanity style of The Office might seem like a ludicrously insensitive sneak attack, but the makers of In the Loop are savvy wolves in sheep’s clothing. They use faux reality-T.V. looseness as an antidote to high-flown demagoguery, yet they get their complex points across with the clarity of “Yes We Can.”

Not that their vision is so sanguine. The fresh-faced British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), opines on a talk-radio interview that an impending Middle Eastern war is “unforeseeable.” Of course, higher up within the government, war is quite foreseeable—in fact, it’s being actuated behind layers of sticky red tape—so the Prime Minister’s spin-doctor, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), is assigned to Foster for damage control. Tucker is a Scots sociopath whose trenchant profanity is probably like Karl Rove’s id on rollerblades. He trains the naïve secretary to speak in ambivalent bromides, and against Foster’s better judgment, the secretary uses them at antiwar conferences held by the American Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy, Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy). Foster, along with a document by Clark’s assistant Liza (Anna Chlumsky), are supposed to be Clark’s ace in the hole against the forces of her pro-war opponent, Linton Barwick (David Rasche). But, through swaths of convolutions, obfuscations, and manipulations, the strength of her hand goes up and down like the Scales of Justice turned into a playground seesaw.

The Middle Eastern war isn’t Iraq, though it’s clearly an echo of it. The head honchos on both sides of the Atlantic go unnamed and the references (Lily Allen, I Heart Huckabees, etc.) are clearly anachronistic for a 2002-3 timeframe. But the filmmakers are too clever as satirists to fall into the Iraq trap; In the Loop depicts the horrendous ways in which any modern war can be tricked into erupting. Similarities to Iraq give the writers (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, Ian Martin, and the director, Armondo Iannucci) moral ground to stand on—not a soapbox to scold from.

The cast, however, is given several opportunities to scold, shout, seethe and weave strands of B.S. with a scatological loom. Within the loop are hacks, stalwarts, armchair ideologues, sadists and suck-ups, and Iannucci gives each type a send-up, but not dismissively. Most of the actors deserve to get props, but Capaldi and James Gandolfini (as a pragmatic American general) are given the funniest and most difficult roles, respectively.

I usually wince at “pure” evil characters in “serious” movies, but Capaldi makes a robotic weasel like Tucker seem plausible; only once did I think he had his own opinion on something and wasn’t just brokering power for its own sake or for the sake of his ego. To paraphrase from The Lion in Winter, his human parts are missing; but it’s not within this movie’s docudrama purview to examine how that lack affects him internally. Gandolfini, on the other hand, has a role that seems alien to antiwar farce: the tough, sympathetic, mostly respectable Army careerist. His general has Tony Soprano’s physical menace, but that same imposing physique is only one tool that Gandolfini uses to give Lt. General Miller his gravitas. Miller is Soprano with brains as well as guts—pun intended, of course. One of the best—and tensest—scenes in the film pits these two characters against one another in a strength-of-will battle that rivals the Daniel Day-Lewis/Paul Dano confrontations in There Will Be Blood. Here, “good” has such supple reserves of violent strength that you almost fear for “evil.” It almost gives a glint of humanity to “evil.”

But this movie is much too sophisticated for good vs. evil, just as it’s too sophisticated for blind partisanship. Actual political parties, and even the terms “right” and “left,” are inconspicuously omitted. Yet, at the same time, this isn’t an example of that debased form of satire that swipes at both sides equably (and nihilistically) as if trying to adhere to some phony equal-time doctrine—which is typically more an entrenched belief in commercial potential than equality. The writers are probably all for the nuanced political thinking that Foster aspires to, and aren’t so lofty as to be against War as they are against going to war without having the facts straight—as Foster doesn’t. But they also know that wishy-washy idealists like Foster are no match for robo-Roves like Tucker. And that they’re no match because Foster (like many of his fellow idealists) is too softheaded and too easily swayed by personal gain; the system itself doesn’t prevent them from winning, those that manipulate it do, and so do the softies’ own shortcomings.

The resemblance In the Loop bears to The Office gives the film its humor, humanity, and horror. It flips the T.V. conception on its head. In the show, the joke is how strident the paper-company employees are despite their bleak station as paper-company employees. The movie invests that same cluelessness in its characters—the joke being not how powerless individuals are, but how powerful they are unwittingly; they flap their meager butterfly wings in Southampton and cause hurricanes over the Middle East. These people are petty all right—and it’s fair game to titter at their foibles—but they’re not trapped in a priggish determinism, as the characters were in a comparable recent farce, Burn After Reading. Some (like Clark and Miller) can play the game responsibly, but some (like Tucker and Barwick) don’t, and others (like Foster) can’t. In the Loop is more cautionary tale than condemnation.

It takes more than cleverness to make something like this work. Scenes that you laugh at early on make you shudder in retrospect. This isn’t always appealing in comedies; such turnarounds in Observe and Report, for instance, left me sour. But here the viewpoint is consistent, humane, and intellectually respectable; to the audience and the characters, the outcomes may be “unforeseeable,” but the twists and turns are products of sound dramatic logic. Plus the filmmakers don’t object to dropping language potent enough to give granny a heart attack, and their timing is generally punctual. (It’s slower at first, and quibblingly British, but it’s almost impossible to foul up good lines in this breakneck form.) Perhaps because the movie is a spin off of a B.B.C. show, The Thick of It, the principals have had time to practice.

In the Loop is a dextrous political comedy, and it may even become a classic of the genre. I am more ambivalent on the topic than James Agee, who once wrote that “If you have to choose between fun for brain’s sake and fun for fun’s sake, I certainly prefer the latter,” but In the Loop’s intellectual baggage prevents it (intentionally) from making one delirious the way a great non-political comedy like Hot Fuzz can. Still, like The Daily Show at its best, In the Loop sometimes blurs the demarcation between brain-fun and fun-fun, and that can make you just loopy enough to seek political office.