But if O'Donnell helps ground the film, he also leads the filmmakers to follow him when, temporarily angst-ridden, he leaves the White House to watch his son play football. For the movie, it's a terrible third-down decision: We lose track of the main action during a crucial period, as the Kennedy group struggles to make sense of contradictory telegrams from Khrushchev.

Then again, the moviemakers organize this film's entire 150-minute length less around the chess game with the Kremlin than around an us-against-them melodrama of the Kennedy camp vs. everyone else. The moviemakers' view of the others could be summarized in the line "There are no wise old men." They reduce the more rigid Cold Warriors to a blur of uptight Pentagon and State Department types. These ultra-white men in suits and uniforms growl about father Joe Kennedy's espousal of appeasement before World War II, and theorize as to whether weakness runs in the Kennedy family. Most of the real work gets done with a series of handoffs from Jack to Bobby or O'Donnell, along with an occasional assist by Dylan Baker's McNamara. "Impress me," Jack orders his brother. Bobby does his best to live up to the command, whether brainstorming without Jack at Excomm, a special executive committee of the National Security Council, or having a critical meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

The rest of the characters are treated according to how they measure up in a Kennedy-centric universe. Early on, our U.N. ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, puckishly calls himself a coward for suggesting that the United States swap its Jupiter missiles in Turkey for Khrushchev's missiles in Cuba. The Kennedys ultimately agree to the swap as part of a deal -- with the proviso that it not be publicized. No one picks up on the irony of the tough-as-nails Kennedys following "weak" Stevenson's lead. Although O'Donnell is dovish toward Stevenson, the kitchen cabinet's question of whether Stevenson has world-class cojones mucks up the staging and editing of his crowd-pleasing confrontation with the Soviets at the U.N. Donaldson keeps cutting to the TV watchers in Washington, who voice first doubt, then approval; it's like a bad backstage musical in which the director chops the big number into pieces to include the action in the wings.

TV's "The Missiles of October" may have been a four-square production, full of accents as pronounced as Costner's, but at least it had the guts to concentrate on the moves and countermoves with Moscow (making Khrushchev himself, not O'Donnell, the third main character). "Thirteen Days" provides such a hazy impression of what's going on back in the USSR that when RFK seals his deal with Dobrynin, it's as if a compact has been made by an international goodwill group. Indeed, when O'Donnell describes himself to Dobrynin's attaché as "the friend," I thought he meant not just a friend of Bobby Kennedy's but also of well-meaning people everywhere. For a moment you wonder why, with so much liberality on both sides, the crisis erupted in the first place.

"The Missiles of October" also assumed that the audience could keep track of a dozen or so divergent voices. Baker's McNamara has a dynamic moment when he browbeats the Navy's chief of operations, but "Thirteen Days" is pretty much a three-man show. At the apex of this triangle is Greenwood's JFK, who's not afraid to appear diffident or irresolute in the eyes of the cocksure and the trigger-happy. Greenwood knows that just one wince when Jack lowers himself into a chair will announce his back pain more loudly than any bleat or bellow, and that the occasional ruminative glance will make his sparks of anger come off as incendiary.

If only the filmmakers had had the same instincts. Synthesizing more revisionist material would have enlarged, not undercut, this movie's presentation of President Kennedy. Making the audience (and Kennedy himself) more aware of his previous failings with Khrushchev, or acknowledging his administration's ongoing vendetta with Castro, would have made Kennedy's resistance to airstrikes or to another invasion of Cuba the position of a man who has evolved as a statesman. Greenwood is great at looking thoughtful, but even amid the Cuban missile crisis, the movie doesn't give him (or us) enough to back up that look. "Thirteen Days," like a cable news channel, wins an undeservedly high interest level because of what it covers, not how well it covers it.

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