One of the rare contemporary films that really is about something, The Company You Keep mixes identity, action and politics to tell a gripping story about what happened to those 1970s antiwar protestors called the Weather Underground (labeled Weathermen by the press) who turned into radical terrorists by blowing up government buildings. They broke laws, endangered lives, fled from prosecution, went into hiding and reinvented themselves. And they are still around, wanted by the FBI, living normal lives under assumed names. News stories occasionally surface in which one of them is nailed in some secret small-town hideaway and brought to justice. But this is not only a story about 13 Weathermen who killed a security guard in a botched Michigan bank robbery 30 years ago. It is also about one member of the accused who wasn’t even present that day, a solid citizen who is forced to go underground again to prove his innocence. In a role tailored to fit his integrity and liberal conscience, Mr. Redford has never been better.

The story begins when a former Weatherman involved in the robbery (Susan Sarandon)—hiding out as a Vermont housewife but on her way at last to surrender to the FBI—gets recognized from a Most Wanted poster and arrested at a New York gas station while filling up her car. Mr. Redford plays another former radical now living as a respected Albany civil rights attorney and single father under the alias James Grant, who refuses to take her case and in doing so arouses the suspicions of ambitious, muckraking Albany reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf). Smelling a scoop in the competitive and endangered profession of dwindling newspapers, the aggressive rookie journalist persuades his editor (Stanley Tucci) to let him pursue his hunches, tracks down a college friend (Anna Kendrick) who works for the FBI and discovers that there is no record of lawyer Grant prior to 1979. Hell-bent on beating the authorities to the punch, Ben’s private sleuthing reveals Grant’s true identity to be Nick Sloan, a former colleague of the Vermont soccer mom who is also sought for the Michigan bank heist. Before Ben breaks the story wide open, the Grant/Sloan character leaves his 11-year-old daughter (played by three-octave-singing phenomenon Jackie Evancho, discovered on America’s Got Talent) with his brother (Chris Cooper) and goes on the run. His fact-finding mission to clear his name, with the ruthless reporter in hot pursuit, leads him across the U.S. searching for the whereabouts of the only person who can help him: an ex-girlfriend (Julie Christie) who disappeared years ago to the beaches of Big Sur with a new lover (Sam Elliott). Now his goal is to locate her, rekindle an old loyalty and convince her to give herself up in order to save him and ensure his daughter’s future. Mr. Redford’s quest through the detritus of his mysterious past—encountering a veteran cast of links along the way that includes Nick Nolte, Brendan Gleeson, Terrence Howard and Richard Jenkins—gives the film a compelling thrust of power and suspense. It will leave you breathless.

Adapted from the novel by Neil Gordon, the brilliant screenplay by Lem Dobbs illuminates the plight of the cub reporter in a new age of journalism, updates the latest tracking strategies of the FBI and, in one affecting prison interview between Mr. LaBeouf and Ms. Sarandon, offers some earnest insight into the validity of the noble but misdirected romantic idealism of the ’70s radicals. From archival footage of actual TV news coverage of the Weathermen’s attacks, to a dazzling display of perfect performances, to the complex emotional relationships that result in guilt by association, the disparate elements in The Company You Keep are robustly collated by the keen, well-crafted direction of a master filmmaker at the top of his form. It’s only April, but this is one of the best films of 2013.

rreed@observer.com

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Running Time 125 minutes

Written by Lem Dobbs (screenplay) and Neil Gordon (novel)

Directed by Robert Redford

Starring Robert Redford, Shia LeBeouf and Julie Christie

4/4 Stars

“He’s a good-hearted day trader and ultimately trying to look out for his buddy and do the right thing,” said Mr. Mailer when the Transom bumped into him at the Pen Edmont holiday benefit, the volunteer organization that works with high-school students in underserved communities to encourage reading and writing, at Half King on Sunday, Dec. 13. Mr. Mailer, whose late father was the president of the PEN American Center between 1984 and 1986, was invited to join the committee by his friend, Edmont co-founder Stephanie LaCava, who works at Vogue.

To prepare for his role, Mr. Mailer underwent voice training for a Long Island accent and shadowed traders at several firms during the summer. “One of the more exciting places was Johns Thomas Financial,” he said. “Tommy Belesis [the CEO], who is also in the movie, is essentially a ringmaster and he fires up his 300 traders like you wouldn’t believe. I was shadowing from 9 in the morning to about 6, and when Tommy finished his morning speech, I was on my feet from then on, so I kind of understood the addiction to the adrenaline. It was amazing. The traders eat their lunch at their desk, take a few smoke breaks and pop an Adderall to keep it going.”

Mr. Mailer, who described himself as coming from a “liberal” perspective, said he was biased against Wall Street before spending time at the firm. “I always thought that you’re not actually making anything. You’re taking money from here and putting it there and taking a cut,” he said. “But there are some traders out there who are doing some very good things with the money that they’re moving around. What I discovered is that actually a lot of medical research is financed because of firms like this and education programs. The world would stop without Wall Street.”

The Mailer name, alas, did not impress his new financial-whiz friends. “I don’t think the Wall Street world is [my father’s] biggest fan base,” Mr. Mailer said.

Meanwhile, his screenplay for Norm’s The Naked and the Dead lies waiting. “I was unbelievably bummed that I couldn’t get that thing made while he was alive,” John Buffalo said. “It’s such a huge-budget film that we need the right packaging. But when the time is right for the next $100 million World War II movie, I think it’s in the running.”

With the movie scene currently dominated by so much dismal trash like Couples Retreat, Zombieland and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it would be a treat to welcome an artistically viable valentine to the most dynamic city in the world with a huge star-studded cast. New York, I Love You is not it.

An eclectic group of 11 directors with varying degrees of talent play global leapfrog, skipping and jumping from Chinatown to Central Park to Greenwich Village to Coney Island to helm 11 overlapping stories about the Big Apple; it was completed in eight weeks. (A 12th, Scarlett Johansson, has been eliminated, for reasons never explained. Maybe her little vignette was too boring and empty to include, but it couldn’t be less satisfying or more inconsequential than some of the others included here.) This is the second in a continuing series of movies dedicated to the unifying theme of love in big cities from producer Emmanuel Benbihy (Paris, je t’aime). Next up at bat: Rio, Shanghai and Jerusalem, in what you might seriously call a true definition of vay izmir. The New York rule: Each director had a deadline of two days to complete his segment. The result is every bit as truncated and zigzaggy as you might imagine. The whole thing looks like it was edited with pinking shears.

Horrible, streaky, dizzying camera work leads you across the bridge into the city by taxi while two passengers argue about how to get to Brooklyn. The driver throws them out of his cab. In Chinatown, actor-director Wen Jiang, who co-starred with Gong Li in Red Sorghum and is often called “the Robert De Niro of China,” tells  the tale of a scruffy slacker pickpocket (Hayden Christensen) who follows a girl into a cafe, returns her stolen cell phone and gets into an argument with her boyfriend (Andy Garcia), whose wallet he has previously pilfered. Next, India’s Mira Nair enters the diamond district to film an encounter between a Hasidic bride-to-be (Natalie Portman) and a Hindu diamond merchant (Irrfan Khan), whose cultural differences find a shared common ground as they talk about everything from food restrictions to her shaved head. On the Upper West Side, a British musician (Orlando Bloom) works intensely to finish a score for an animated film, staying in touch with the outside world through cell phone calls from the director’s assistant (Christina Ricci), who insists he read two novels by Dostoyevsky in order to understand the project. He’s confused by this strange request, but when she shows up at his dark, grungy apartment to help him with his creative task, he learns a whole new meaning of Russian literature. Directed by Japan’s Shunji Iwai, who knows how to make two minutes feel like War and Peace.

The best story in the film comes from Yvan Attal, the Israeli-born French director and husband of gruesome-looking actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. It focuses on a fast-talking Soho pickup artist (Ethan Hawke) who puts the make on a sexy married woman (Maggie Q), without knowing she’s a professional hooker. Mr. Hawke’s seduction techniques are both charming and hilarious, giving the lie to the theory that Manhattan hustlers, from Times Square to the meatpacking district, have all the answers before you can even ask the questions. Moving uptown to Central Park, on the day of his senior prom, a heartbroken, lovesick 17-year-old kid (Anton Yelchin) goes to a pharmacist (James Caan) to buy condoms. The old man proposes the boy do a good deed for humanity by taking his crippled daughter (Olivia Thirlby) to the prom in her wheelchair. The dour mood shifts like a lightning strike after the dance, when they are forced to walk home through the park. The kid gets the romantic surprise of his life when the pitiful girl unexpectedly trains him in the nuances of handicapped sex. Little does he know she’s an actress, preparing for a role. In the most pretentious and incomprehensible vignette of all, written by Anthony Minghella, interrupted by his death and finished by Bollywood success Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), the great Julie Christie plays a retired opera singer who checks into a posh hotel on the Upper East Side and shares a glass of Champagne with a crippled bellhop who brings her violets (Shia LaBeouf). He throws himself out of the window to his death, but when she reports it to the hotel manager (John Hurt), the body has disappeared. Before the weirdness ends, the suggestion is apparent that everything has either happened in the woman’s past or been a figment of her imagination. Pure twaddle.

There’s more, in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of pointless brushes with destiny. Two distraught lovers (Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper) speed toward one another across Manhattan, one by subway, the other on foot, as they try to figure out if their one-night stand might produce the same sparks the second time around. Cult director Allen Hughes and writer Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, collaborated on this one, which pants with energy and pace, if not content. Actress Natalie Portman returns, in the role of debut director, to frame the story of a black baby sitter who raises eyebrows as he escorts his charge, a pink and pretty all-American little girl, through Central Park on a sunny afternoon. Two housewives praise him for being a great male nanny, but when he returns the moppet to her mother at the end of the day, he turns out to be a ballet dancer—and the child’s real father.

And so it goes, with characters from one episode sometimes rubbing elbows with participants from another. The hooker who left Ethan Hawke on the curb in Soho drops off her lingerie in a Chinese laundry and is shocked when the next customer (Chris Cooper) speaks perfect Cantonese. On the boardwalk at Brighton Beach, Abe (Eli Wallach), an old man recovering from a broken hip, is doomed to endure the nagging of his annoying, mean-spirited wife of 63 years, Mitzie (Cloris Leachman). She’s the worst, but she’s all he’s got. The movie bounces back and forth between these characters like a game of table tennis. The vignettes are like a collection of New Yorker short stories, too often with little or no literary or cinematic trajectory, and almost always too fragmented to add up to anything substantial. There isn’t one that I would call involving enough to engage the emotions. The goal is to paint a colorful canvas of a sprawling metropolis with an ever-changing scenario thanks to a constantly fluctuating population. Unfortunately, it’s a portrait of “the city that never sleeps” that often needs a NoDoz. The very nature of New York’s vastness as a melting pot of contrasts makes it a natural for a movie like this, but it’s the movie’s downfall, too. So many stories to choose from, but hard to connect the dots.

The only thing New York, I Love You really proves is how difficult it is, in today’s culturally bankrupt film industry, for good actors to find jobs.

rreed@observer.com