The next few days in the run-up to a momentous Senate vote on Kavanaugh will be … trying. Let’s cleanse the palate before we embark.

I can’t decide whether casting Bale as Cheney is one of the most inspired choices in movie history or so obvious that it should pass without notice. On the one hand, who looks at a 44-year-old Welsh matinee idol and thinks, “He’d make a perfect portly, bald, sixtysomething American politician with heart problems”?

On the other hand, what better training to portray Dick Cheney could there be than to play the Dark Knight? Both characters are brooding conservatives willing to do anything, up to and including torture, to protect the innocents around them from evil psychotics.

All that’s left for Bale is to play Dirty Harry in a reboot of that franchise and he’ll have hit the modern trifecta of flawed authoritarians willing to Go Too Far if need be to preserve law and order.

Anyway, don’t expect a flattering portrait. Not that any Hollywood biopic of a figure derided in office by the left as “Darth Vader” would be flattering, but director Adam McKay is an outspoken liberal known for comedy. (He wrote and directed “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers,” among others.) You can get a taste of the likely tone from Sam Rockwell’s cameo as Dubya here. He looks the part, albeit not quite as much as Bale does, but the oafish chomping on fried chicken opposite Cheney’s cool and calculating evil-villain persona comes right up to the line of one-dimensional parody, with Bush the amiable puppet and Cheney obviously pulling his strings. Probably worth seeing anyway, though, just to gawk at how close some of the resemblances are. Especially Bale’s to his character.