With the passing of the seminal director Mike Nichols, I’d like to take the opportunity to briefly spotlight an underappreciated film of his: 1998’s political satire Primary Colors.

Based on Joe Klein’s anonymous published novel, Primary Colors tells the story of Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), a young black college professor — the grandson of a famously martyred civil rights pioneer — who is roped into the dark horse presidential campaign of a charismatic but obscure Democratic politician. The candidate, Jack Stanton (John Travolta), is a handsome, though overweight, white-haired Southern governor who rose from working class roots and a hippie youth to become a politician — even though he has a hard time keeping it in his pants. Sound familiar? Yes, Primary Colors is most obviously a film a clef of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. But it’s more than a gossipy tell-all to snicker at between Monica Lewinsky newsbreaks. For one thing, it’s oddly prescient, featuring a lead character who almost reads like a Barack Obama stand-in (black intellectual defined by his estrangement from a distant father figure), years before anyone knew who Obama was.

Nichols strikes the right tone for the film, somewhere halfway between broad satire and political realism. Scenes where John Travolta bizarrely serenades an distraught adviser played by Billy Bob Thornton with “You Are My Sunshine” at a backwoods BBQ fit in alongside scenes where the characters sit back and genuinely contemplate where their ideals went. And the director draws strong performances out of an excellent cast, which also includes Emma Thompson as Stanton’s wife Susan, Kathy Bates as a campaign worker with a complicated past, and the late, great Larry Hagman, who plays Governor Stanton’s biggest rival, a seemingly untouchable politician with a near perfect record. A late scene with Hagman and Travolta speaking to each other by a pool in Florida is like a peak into the inner world of politicians — not just the campaigns and the debates, but the things we’ll never get to see, the one-on-ones between the men and women who control the fate of their country.

Nichols uses an effective score by Ry Cooder that reconfigures and rearranges Americana classics like “Tennessee Waltz” and “Camptown Races” to create a thematically loaded musical backdrop that places the story firmly in the camp of great Southern stories. It is ironic, yet fitting that the director who revolutionized the cinematic use of new pop and rock music in The Graduate should find himself now drawn to telling stories in the tunes of great old American classics, as much a part of the American landscape as the pinewood trees.