As it turns out, we really didn’t know Dick.

In the last few weeks there have been a couple worthy comedies struggling to keep from getting lost among the heavy hitters; coincidentally, both star Kirsten Dunst: Drop Dead Gorgeous, and now Dick. The latter, directed by Andrew Fleming (The Craft), is a romp of revisionist history that lays credit/blame for bringing down the Nixon administration on a couple clueless nymphs.

Dunst plays Betsy, best friend to Arlene (“Dawson’s” Michelle Williams), an inseparable D.C. pair for whom the adventure starts when they sneak out of Arlene’s mom’s (Teri Garr) apartment at The Watergate Hotel to mail a love letter to Bobby Sherman the night of the fateful break-in. Before long they’re walking Nixon’s neglected dog, baking marijuana cookies for a crooning Leonid Brezhnev, leaving 18 minute and 30 second messages on a White House tape recorder, and spilling everything they know to a couple bickering, effete prima donna Washington Postreporters.

Co-written by Fleming and first-time writer Sheryl Longin, Dick is a treat to watch from start to finish, filled with great period music, fashion, and cultural references that capture the era much better than “That 70s Show.” While it’s a tall order to make these historical personages look any more ridiculous than they really were, seeing a cast made up mostly of players from “Saturday Night Live” and “Kids in the Hall” riff on Henry Kissinger (Saul Rubinek, who strangely enough was also in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, though not as the illustrious doctor), G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer), Rosemary Woods (Ana Gasteyer), John Dean (Jim Breuer), Bob Haldeman (Dave Foley), Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCullough), and Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell) somehow makes a fitting epilog. As Tricky D himself, largely unsung comic genius Dan Hedaya is absolutely great, growling, mugging and swearing his way through a scandal he made but never did understand. Even the multitude of jokes about his name never quite wear thin, though almost.

Treading a rewardingly balanced line between gratuitous and clever, Dick suffers only in that it may be too smart for its target audience. Though starring a couple GenY faves, it is rife with allusions not only to actual events made perhaps too familiar -- as a few characters remind us -- to those who survived the Watergate years, but to watermarks in our take on those events; anyone whose hasn’t seen All the President’s Men and Stone’s film will miss some very funny inferences.

Who says we don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore? B+

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