Provided you’re not perversely nostalgic for Joseph McCarthy’s reign of blacklisting terror, you probably won’t gain much in the way of an ideological epiphany from George Clooney’s new drama, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” You might learn a thing or two about gleaning a sharp, compelling bit of moviemaking from a somewhat isolated historical event. Either way, it’s the perfect date movie for an apprehensive film studies major looking to break the ice with that cute, albeit nubile, political science major.

Don’t get me wrong, the theme “Good Night” espouses is a banal one - ethical journalism is good, McCarthy’s unverified slander is bad. However, it’s delivered with a dexterous mˇlange of the sincere and the nimble. Clearly influenced by the brothers Coen and Steven Soderbergh, Clooney is fast becoming a major filmmaker. “Good Night” is only his second film after 2002’s debut of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”

“Confessions” was an unusually frantic biopic of game show host Chuck Barris. Similarly, “Good Night” lavishly embellishes on historical truth. The subject this time is Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn), a probing, investigative TV newscaster who’s involved in a game of public relations chicken with McCarthy. The matchup is Murrow’s gingerly ethical style versus McCarthy’s dimly purported records of Murrow’s communist activity. McCarthy trivializes Murrow’s ethics, just as those ethics constitute the fulcrum of Murrow’s case against McCarthy. Imagine a gruff mobster who didn’t like this movie cocking a .45 under my throat as I type, and you’ve roughly got the film-criticism equivalent of Murrow’s troubles.

The prevailing dramaturgical gestalt is devil-may-care, go-with-your-gut, and unmistakably direct. But Clooney’s too smart for the crass stuff. Indeed, his father was a noted telecaster in the 1960s, and one infers from his richly nuanced portrait of the milieu that studio field trips were an everyday event. Clooney’s direction vacillates between looseness redolent of John Cassavetes’ ’60s work and graceful notes that undermine Murrow’s inherent triumphs. For example, a tangent exploring the furtive marriage of two co-workers (Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr.) both woozily distracts from the main storyline’s unabashed inspiration and simultaneously smothers it in another layer of hazy precariousness. And the titular mantra, ejaculatory and singular as it is, usually precedes an overextended passage of Murrow shrouded in darkness, the atmosphere growing jarringly dubious and uncertain.

Though at times unconvincing - especially with regard to a minor character driven to chronic depression by criticism and personal trouble - the mix of smooth and bristly naturalism generally simmers. It also seems apposite to the material, considering Clooney is tackling some of the era’s repressed issues head-on. While mostly adhering to the values of Murrow and Co., the director sometimes lets our more modern norms bleed over in pieces ranging from Murrow’s hilariously suggestive interview with the flamboyantly closeted icon Liberace, to a recurring studio session with an African-American jazz singer that emphasizes the otherwise predominantly diversity-free setting. With every big step forward the film articulates, there remains a bevy of tensions to be resolved.

While some may find the sequences of the transcripted telecasts boring, in a way I’m reassured by their dissatisfaction. Any other filmmaker would have spiced Murrow up to make his soapbox speeches translate more cinematically, but Clooney remains mired in the “now.” Be that now particularly solemn or frantic. He’s taken a subject deeply familiar to him and, with a knack for the genuine, made it familiar to many more.