At various turns, Abraham Lincoln (1930), D.W. Griffith’s first and most notorious sound film, comes off as the legendary director’s W.– the story of a simple, silly good ole boy’s rise to the U.S. Presidency. Walter Huston portrays young Abe as a tough but bumbling doof, romantic daydreamer and idle underachiever. Even his bride-to-be, Mary Todd, curses him as a “country baboon” at one point. But the rest of the film illustrates every last Honest Abe tall tale. Well, in that sense, it’s a lot like W., too: When in presidential mode, Huston’s Lincoln is as uncanny a reproduction of a national myth as Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush is of a national disgrace.

At other moments, Abraham Lincoln is Griffith’s Nixon, a strong example of a film director tempering his political convictions in order to embrace an unlikely subject. The filmmaker who re-invigorated the Ku Klux Klan with Birth of a Nation treats the Great Emancipator as a complex, admirable character. Early on, Griffith establishes wild young Lincoln as the hardiest fighter, drinker and railsplitter in Illinois. He’s a brash man’s man but gets all goofy and impulsive around his first great love, society girl Anne Rutledge (Una Merkel) . Griffith presents this historically contested relationship (no solid evidence of the affair with married Rutledge exists) as the experience that sobered Abe into mature leadership. Anne’s sudden death from typhoid sends Abe into a depressed stupor from which he emerges sounding like a far-seeing prophet.

During Lincoln’s rise as a self-taught Illinois lawyer and legislator, he catches the eye of feisty debutante Mary Todd (Kay Hammond), whose society matchmakers are steering her toward powerhouse Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas. “A lot of people seem to think a man named, uh, Abraham Lincoln is going even further than Mr. Douglas,” Mary says. Her friend shrieks,”Why Mary Todd, have you gone crazy? You compare an unknown cornfield lawyer with a brilliant, cultured gentleman like Stephen A. Douglas?” (This is screenwriting for our times: transparent as a Baggie.)

But no one is more down on Lincoln than old Abe himself: “[I] got less property and owe more debts than anybody that ever run for legislature.” When Ms. Todd aggressively pursues him, he panics: “That woman scares me… smart as pepper and pretty, too.” Even at the wedding, when advised to take a drink to calm his nerves, he frets, “My legs are too frightened to pay any attention to liquor.”

After triumphing at the famed Lincoln-Douglas debate on the abolition of slavery, Lincoln nevertheless loses the race for Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate to Democratic incumbent Douglas. He remains wracked with self-loathing. “I’m 50 years old… a failure at everything. If I died today, nobody’d ever know I’d lived.” A moment later a Republican party representative reports that the debates have made Lincoln a national figure and asks that he become the party’s candidate for president.

Tensions in the South are “boiling over” as Abe puts it, illustrated by a brief scene of a dashing Virginian of Rhett Butler looks and Ashley Wilkes manners exhorting a pro-slavery mob. The man declares personal war on “every abolitionist who dares defile the soil of Old Virginia!” “Who’s that?” says a bystander. “Oh, that’s the actor John Wilkes Booth. He can’t act, but the women don’t know it.”

Griffith shows a nice bit of narrative economy by indicating Lincoln’s election victory through a simple, quiet closeup of Mary’s hand scratching out the word “Passenger” on a luggage tag and replacing it with “President” in her dainty script. Abe laughs warmly offscreen, and we see his hand pat Mary’s. “Awww, Mary…”

In Abraham Lincoln, the president’s advisers oppose his drumbeat to civil war (like the lefties, moderates and traditional conservatives who questioned Bush’s Iraq War) and attempt to control him (like Bush’s neocon puppetmasters): “Then we agree… that we must yield to the demands of the South and evacuate Fort Sumter. We agree that our president must be firmly guided by us. We must make every effort to control his inexperienced judgment.” Abe’s not having it. He steps up and asserts his role as the decider: “I will shoulder all responsibility,” he says, ordering relief troops to Fort Sumter in preparation for a Confederate assault. Griffith’s, Huston’s and cinematographer Karl Struss’s finest moment in the film lingers on Lincoln’s grave reaction after having just signed a request for 75,000 troops to kick off the war. A daugerrotype come to chilling life.

Speaking of: Huston’s resemblance to Lincoln grows more astonishing as he “ages” decades, adopting the famous jawline beard and stovepipe hat. (Good thing, since, in an early scene where Abe seduces Ms. Rutledge, Huston wears heavy silent movie eyeliner and lipstick that evoke his granddaughter Anjelica Huston circa 1988.) The screen Mary Todd Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant are also shocking photocopies of the originals.

Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of Griffith’s worst films because of its stilted dawn-of-the-talkies dialogue and staging, but I found it to be at least as dynamic and diverting a political cartoon as Oliver Stone’s latest historical tossed salad. Kill the sound and you’ll catch some signature Griffith moments of visual play, like the montage of marching boots, cavalry and cannons assembling for war in an insane rush. His whip pans to visual punchlines pack as much wit and electricity as John Ford’s. Griffith’s legacy lies in these scattered contributions to film grammar and the art of historical pageantry, not his politics or historical accuracy. Oliver Stone is staring at a similar, enviable fate.