Mary Poppins Returns will face some unlikely competition for the Golden Globe award for best musical or comedy film in January. Vice, nominated in the same category, is a darkly comical biopic of former US vice-president Dick Cheney. An alternative title might have been Darth Vader Returns.

A decade after leaving office, Cheney is widely seen as not only the most powerful VP in American history but also the most despised. He was the power behind George W Bush’s throne when America tortured suspects, opened a prison at Guantánamo Bay and waged war on Iraq.

But Vice comes at a moment that, with Donald Trump in the White House, Bush has benefited by comparison and undergone a public rehabilitation. Six in 10 Americans say they now have a favourable view of the 43rd president, according to a CNN poll earlier this year, compared with three in 10 when he left the White House. Whether the nostalgic glow will extend to 77-year-old Cheney, however, remains less certain.

“The thing about W is he’s an incredibly likable person – it’s just that he was a very destructive president,” said Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton who intends to see Vice when it is released on Christmas Day. “Now he’s out of the presidency, he’s just likable. Cheney remains a hooded, dark, saturnine figure and I’m sure the movie can’t deal with all his darkness.”

Blumenthal, a biographer of Abraham Lincoln, added: “Bush gets a bye because he was a manipulated figure and the burden of blame falls on Cheney. There’s nothing tragic about Cheney. His story is sinister.”

Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, left, and Sam Rockwell as George W Bush in a scene from Vice. Photograph: Matt Kennedy/AP

Written and directed by Adam McKay, Vice stars Christian Bale, who reportedly gained 40lb for the role, and transformed himself with makeup, prosthetics and wigs to look the part. It also features Sam Rockwell as Bush, Steve Carrell as the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Amy Adams as Cheney’s wife, Lynne.

A positive review in the Hollywood Reporter notes: “The first we see of Dick Cheney is as a drunken 22-year-old wastrel in 1963 Wyoming, a kid who could arguably benefit from the discipline instilled by a stint in the armed forces (he never did serve).

“Cut to 9/11, when then-Vice President Cheney assumes total power over the government in the temporary absence of the president. McKay thus poses his central question: How the hell did this two-time Yale dropout make the jump from nonentity to string-pulling power behind the throne?”

It is thought to be the first major movie about a vice-president, often a thankless role in the principal’s shadow. George HW Bush, who was Ronald Reagan’s deputy for eight years, once joked there was “nothing substantive to do at all”. But Cheney changed all that, taking a central role in the “war on terror” after the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11.

In 2002, for example, after the White House leaked a story to the New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had bought aluminium tubes intended for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium, Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to cite the report as evidence as that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons.

He repeatedly dismissed human rights groups that raised concerns over the use of torture by the CIA. In 2011, an unrepentant Cheney continued to defend what he called “enhanced interrogation” techniques including waterboarding, claiming that they produced “phenomenal” results.

Trump has claimed that “torture works” but has little else in common with the former vice-president. Critics regard Trump as a vulgarian who prefers tweeting to reading briefing documents. Yet, as he nears the midway point in his presidential term, it could be argued that Trump has not yet perpetrated any single act as consequential or destructive as the Iraq war, widely seen as the biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam.

Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School for Social Research in New York and leading member of Witness Against Torture, a group seeking to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, said: “Nothing about Trump should now cast Cheney in a more favourable light. In truth they represent different versions – each nearly a caricature – of the American ruling class. Trump is a vain, imbecilic Master of the Universe who has sleazed his way to the top – first of the Manhattan real estate world, and now the American state.

“Cheney is a cunning, ass-kicking oil man, expert at quietly playing a rigged system for profit and imperial power. Trump is both more loathsome as a personality and easier to laugh at. But Cheney, to this point, has proven more dangerous. Ask the weeping mother of Afghanistan and Iraq and the men shattered by their torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.”

Varon added: “To this day Cheney defends the moral rot with which he plagued America and the world. We owe him our sustained and vigilant condemnation.”

Cheney – whose daughter, Liz Cheney, recently became the highest-ranking woman in Republican leadership in Congress – is certainly a rewarding subject for biographies and biopics. He has been close to the heart of American power for four decades, first as White House chief of staff (the youngest ever) under Gerald Ford, then as defence secretary under George HW Bush, who led the US into the Gulf war in 1991 – a military adventure also not without its critics.

Dick Cheney, fourth right, poses as his daughter, congresswoman Liz Cheney, fourth left, is sworn in at the 115th US Congress on 3 January 2017. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labour lawyer and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said: “Incredibly, even liberal Americans are now romanticising the two Bush presidents and their longtime partner in crime, Dick Cheney. The two invasions of Iraq destroyed a nation, killed untold numbers of innocents (certainly well over a million), and destabilised the entire Middle East.

“Remember when so many of us marched in record numbers to try to prevent this war? Meanwhile, the war against Afghanistan is now in its 18th year with no end in sight. As unhinged as Trump may be, he has yet to start a new war as these other leaders did.”

Time may uncover an important difference between Bush and Cheney. The former president has been seen hugging Michelle Obama and handing her sweets; at his father’s funeral, he broke down and displayed his vulnerability to the world. Cheney, meanwhile, looked on from the pews, content to remain shadowy and elusive. The one man who may not care whether Vice burnishes his legacy his Cheney himself.

Jake Bernstein, co-author of the book Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, said: “There has been some rehabilitation with George W Bush; in comparison with Donald Trump, everyone starts to look better. But Dick Cheney liked the fact everyone called him Darth Vader. I don’t think there’ll be an effort on his part to soften his image.”