The actors seem more like very special guest stars than like real, vintage 1968 Americans, and their period-appropriate get-ups - the narrow lapels and skinny ties, the sheath dresses and piled-up hairdos - are more distracting than convincing. Some of the stories feel too obviously melodramatic, while others are vague to the point of inscrutability. In the Vietnam- and drug-related plots, the point is hammered home too hard, while other narratives wind toward no discernible point at all.
Nonetheless the ambition behind Bobby is large and serious. Along with many other Americans who grew up in the wake of the 1960s - for whom figures like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy were always more myth than flesh and blood - Estevez, who was six years old when Kennedy was shot, seems preoccupied with understanding what it was like to live through some of that decade's galvanizing events.
The pulse of history is most audible not in the fictional portions of the movie, but in the moments, especially at the end, when the documentary record takes over. The sound of Kennedy's voice, even as it takes you out of the movie, throws you into a past that seems both terribly remote and uncannily alive. When you hear his patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Estevez set out to make - the one you may wish you were watching.
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