There are no car chases in “Frost/Nixon.” Nobody gets shot. There’s no sex, no violence. It’s about two guys talking on television, for pete’s sake. We even know how the story turns out.

Yet director Ron Howard, armed with a terrific script and blessed by two stunning performances, has turned it into a thriller.

The talking heads are British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) and former U.S. president Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella). The movie’s subject is Frost’s sensational 1977 interview with the only person ever to have resigned the office of president. In the final installment of the multi-part interview, Frost prodded Nixon into admitting for the first time that he had let down the American people by falsely denying his administration’s role in the 1972 Watergate burglary and the failed cover-up that followed.

The film is exciting despite the absence of conventional thriller trappings because Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (adapting his own play) portray the interviews as a battle between determined warriors, a battle that can leave only one man standing. Kevin Bacon, playing a devoted Nixon aide and confidant, aptly likens the interviews to a boxing match.

The first half of the film builds toward the interviews, which consume the final hour or so. Frost has to raise the necessary funds and engage a staff to help him prepare. On the other side, Nixon needs to be persuaded to take part. When associates insist that Frost will be a puffball interviewer — and especially when Frost offers to pay Nixon handsomely for his participation — the former president consents and the stage is set for the battle of words.

Frost’s aim is to revive his flagging career and prove he’s more than a boob-tube personality, yet not until the final session does he get tough. Ironically, he’s inspired by a late-night phone conversation with his adversary. (The call is fictional. “Frost/Nixon” is neither history nor documentary; it’s an entertainment, though an exceptionally good one.)

The disgraced former president yearns to vindicate himself and his presidency by diverting the spotlight from Watergate to his genuine achievements, particularly those in foreign affairs. Instead, to borrow the words of one of Frost’s investigators, the interviews “give Richard Nixon the trial he never had.”

Though staging the interviews as conversational combat is a useful and effective tool, it is the performances of Sheen and Langella more than anything else that make “Frost/Nixon” the superlative film it is. Both actors are reprising their roles in the London and New York productions of Morgan’s play. Sheen is utterly convincing as a man who hungers to do more than emcee mindless TV shows and who’s willing to endure the setbacks and humiliations that line the road to where he wants to be.

But it’s Frank Langella who’s commander-in-chief of “Frost/Nixon.” His Nixon is by turns pitiable and presidential. He’s ever the lonely outsider, charming but socially awkward, a man of sharp intelligence and keen awareness of his place on the world’s stage. Affecting the late president’s deep voice and stooped posture, Langella transcends the role of actor playing Nixon to seemingly become Nixon himself. It is an astonishing performance, one richly deserving of the Academy Award nomination it received on Thursday.