rated R

The audience—not very large and almost all more than 40 years old—lingered. The lights went up, the words “written and directed by Emilio Estevez” appeared, yet no one seemed eager to move. People stood at their seats, or sat huddled together, or strayed slowly into the aisles of the theater. They listened to the rousing Bryan Adams anthem, “Never Gonna Break My Faith,” sung by Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige.

They watched the credits roll over old black and white photographs from the Kennedy family album. Many were crying. A few applauded. But no one seemed terribly eager to leave the company of the people they had just met on the screen or, more importantly perhaps, with whom they had just rekindled fond memories.

“Bobby” is a powerful mix of both real-life and Hollywood nostalgia. It is a film about hope made in a time of cultural and political despair. What measure of its success was deliberately accomplished by Estevez and what measure happens onscreen by accident—and my feeling is that it’s quite a bit of both—does not matter. “Bobby” is a formidable cocktail of memories, and one that will defeat any technical analysis of the movie itself.

The story opens on a sun-drenched California day—June 4, 1968—at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The fire alarm has been pulled and the hotel evacuated, but it is a false alarm. During these moments of low-level confusion, we meet the characters of the film, a collection of people all wandering somewhat unsuccessfully through life.

We meet the retired doorman and his friend (Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte); the hotel manager and his hairstylist wife (William H. Macy and Sharon Stone); the fading chanteuse and her fop of a husband (Demi Moore and Estevez); a pair of street-level Kennedy campaign staffers who decide to drop some acid (Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf) with the hotel drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher); a couple of lonely switchboard operators (Heather Graham and Joy Bryant), one of whom is having an affair with the hotel manager; an upscale couple having marital difficulties (Estevez’s father Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt); and the workers in the kitchen, including a cook (Laurence Fishburne) and a kitchen helper (Freddie Rodriguez, in a quiet, beautiful performance) who has tickets to a legendary Dodgers game that happens to also be taking place that night.

Later in the day, Sen. Robert Kennedy will be fatally shot here. Kennedy is not played by an actor, aside from a few soft focus shots where he mingles with the fictional characters, but is shown in archival footage woven neatly into the narrative flow.

Estevez’s camera wanders through the hotel, catching glimpses of the various lives unfolding there. Omnibus films like this, direct descendents of the films of the late Robert Altman, have become quite trendy in recent years. In the critical and box office success “Crash,” disparate lives collide in unexpected ways. Here, the characters captured by the story have no real connection to one another, other than the fact they are all staying at the same hotel. The idea that these people are so very ordinary and have a slightly unresolved, random connection gives the film its resonance.

Much of Estevez’s script is actually quite flat, but that strangely morphs into a strength over time as we feel we are truly listening to the stuff of everyday life. Since Estevez’s writing in his other movies (“Ransom,” “Men at Work”) has ranged from the clumsy to the incompetent, it’s hard to say that he went looking for that effect here. It could be—and this is the magical intangible of movie-making—that his peculiar style, and his obvious limits as a writer, blended beautifully with his overall vision for this one film. Either way, the cumulative result of all this quotidian behavior is startlingly effective.

The stories are paired off in a fairly square, schematic script. The characterizations are not always successful: William (Elijah Wood) and Diane (Lindsay Lohan) are a young couple getting married so that William will get a preferred assignment in the Army. Wood is as charisma-free as always, and Lohan, pretty as she is, has no idea what to do with her wispy body. Helen Hunt, whose abundance of facial tics was mistaken for Lucille Ball-like comedic expression in her sitcom “Mad About You,” here wears a face that seems to have settled, or been sculpted, into a disconcerting glacial mask. Her character, Samantha, is a well-to-do woman who is in a pointless pursuit of black shoes. Her husband, Jack, is played by Sheen, a fine, smooth, emotional actor who can make anything seem easy to take, as he does here. His scenes are brief, but he has a sadness both in his eyes and in his voice that makes you empathize with his character’s apparent, yet unexplained, pain.

And sometimes the pairs are successful: There are two old men, representing a more pragmatic time, played by Hopkins (as the retired doorman John Casey) and Belafonte (his friend Nelson). The old pros rummage around their lines to find some sly humanity, and it’s a joy to watch them just sit.

Hotel manager Paul (played by Macy), though married to Miriam (Stone), is really playing off Christian Slater’s character. Slater is a resourceful, clever actor who has some quick, pointed moments as the hotel’s food and beverage manager Timmons—in a scene where he’s typing a memo in Spanish, for example, or as his eyes follow Heather Graham when she walks away from him. If you can see an actor undress another character even as his face is slightly out of focus, you know that all cylinders are firing.

Slater’s subtlety softens the obviousness of Macy’s character, Paul. As the hotel manager, he makes big, showy speeches about the right to vote, especially for the newly arrived Latinos. He has precious little dialogue and too much demagoguery, but since he’s speechifying primarily to Timmons, it works. Slater doesn’t allow his face to react—his character is bored with these speeches; he has heard them before.

These scenes with the Latino workers are clearly close to Estevez’s heart—he is the member of the acting family who did not Anglicize his name—and his passion and hope for these new Americans is certainly a refreshing take on what has been a dispiriting dialogue about immigrants in this country.

Finally, there is one pairing that is glorious: Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf. These two play street-level Kennedy campaign staffers who decide to drop acid rather than go out and canvas for Kennedy. The idea of finding comedy in a couple of straight-arrow people getting high is not new, but these two—and LaBeouf, in particular—are so charming and wonderful that you forget the cliché and let their loose-limbed comedy flow over you. If LaBeouf isn’t nominated for a supporting actor Oscar, then people are not paying attention to what a true supporting role ought to be.

It is also in this last pairing that we can find all of Estevez’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer and director. As free as he is with these two actors at times, he’s also the same type of writer who makes a joke by giving the two characters the same name (Cooper). He presents a funny, high-on-acid sequence punctuated with footage from the Vietnam war that ultimately lands in the wrong place. He also has the boys suffer a moment of crisis after their high wears off—not about taking the drugs, but about whether their goofing off might have cost Kennedy the election. This places too much burden in these two functionaries, catapulting them out of the real and into the realm of “symbol,” which is perilously close to parody.

Estevez also makes an unfortunate decision at the end of the film: after Kennedy is shot, the ambient noise of the scenes is drowned out by a recorded Kennedy speech. We hear Kennedy telling us we ought to unite, but we see the dramatized images of the wounded and the terrified. I wanted Estevez to give these characters their due, because he had given the very ordinariness of their lives some stature and importance.

The speech would have been much better served over the end credits, I think, and would have therefore allowed us to better feel the magnitude of this awful murder.

The film also looks like it was shot too quickly by Michael Barrett (sometimes the camera quite literally jumps), and we can see that the meager budget obviously impacted some grander ideas. But that is movie criticism. There is a much greater emotional pull flowing through the veins of “Bobby.”

Estevez does not whip the editing or pacing into a frenzy as Bobby Kennedy’s assassination hurtles toward us, and he offers precious little context for the historical events happening within the timeframe of the film.

And that’s as it should be. We don’t look around and say: “Here we are, in 1968, and it feels as though something important is about to happen.” Kennedy, in fact, is absent for almost the entire film, which rings true: we might be constantly aware of the famous and powerful, but the moments during which our lives actually intersect are few.

Every generation has its brutal, epoch-making events. Estevez has asked us to think about how we are changed and connected and affected by events even if we think we are only marginally, accidentally involved in them. In doing so, “Bobby” is that rare film that makes the audience feel something quite extraordinary.