It's 2007. Senator Jasper Irving is the big white hope for the Republican Party. Veteran journalist Janine Roth has written cover stories for Time magazine but after 40 years in the industry is struggling to have her voice heard. And even decades as a university lecturer hasn’t taught Professor Stephen Malley that most students are pretty bored by his course work.

But what, apart from being played by Hollywood superstars, do they all have in common? Turns out they like to talk. A lot.

With all the intensity of a Scientologist praising L Ron Hubbard, Irving (Tom Cruise, natch) talks about forgetting the US military's post 9/11 mistakes in the Middle East and looking ahead to the future instead. But that's about all he really says while proclaiming, straight-faced: "Do you want to win the war on terror? This is the quintessential yes or no question of our time" and "I'm sick of being humiliated."

Roth (Meryl Streep), given a private audience with the politician, sits through this fervour and realises how her integrity as a reporter has been compromised by the corporate demands of her employer and the government's smoke and mirrors. She's clearly not too bright or self-aware. When Irving points out that her 2001 articles supporting the War on Terror make her as liable as Dubya for the Iraq invasion, Roth acts as if she'd never once considered the notion in the past six years.

And Malley (Robert Redford, whose performance is as loose as his directing) is such a believer in the power of one that he spends an hour berating the once enthusiastic student Todd Hayes, whose idealism has been replaced by cynicism. At least their empty conversation — because that’s really what this film is — is interspersed with battle scenes from Afghanistan, where two of Malley’s former students are indirectly putting his lessons into practice.

At one point during their conversation, Hayes describes a politician as “a guy who never says anything, even though he never stops talking”. He could just as well be talking about ‘Lions For Lambs’.