It’s when our hero is called a "schmuck" by someone aboard Air Force One that "Swing Vote" starts veering into more interesting territory.

His name is Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner). He’s a pretty decent father, a bad employee but a good drinker, and a few days back, all his daughter asked him to do was take her with him when he went to vote. But then he got mad at work, got sloppy at the bar and fell asleep in his pickup truck. When he didn’t show, young Molly (Madeline Carroll) tried to do something sneaky, and vote for him.

But a computer malfunction left his ballot untallied.

Now the nation is deadlocked and the state of New Mexico finds its vote tally dead even. It’s Bud’s uncounted ballot that will decide New Mexico, and the nation. And as the campaigns of both incumbent Republican Andrew Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and challenger Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) shift into crisis mode, it’s a political operative who wants to know: Just who is this schmuck who’s holding up the process?

Of course, in reality he’s not really the problem. We’ve long been told: Every vote counts, and "Swing Vote" goes overboard in presenting a celebration of civic duty. In fact, there is something so pristine and patriotic about "Swing Vote’s" message that we’d be tempted to roll our eyes, if not for the way it sobers up around the day Bud is going to recast his vote, turning surprisingly cynical about the whole political process.

We see the ways in which both candidate and voter stoop to new lows. Bud relishes in the excitement, becoming distracted by his own celebrity, just as his fellow voters kill time by reading about Bud in magazines like US Weekly. The candidates, too, start flip-flopping positions at the drop of the hat. When one candidate seems anti-immigrant, the pro-immigrant candidate changes his tune; ditto for the politician who wants to dam up the river, when he realizes that it’s Bud’s favorite fishing hole.

Of course, it’s a metaphor for America; the detached voter and the clueless candidates, propped up by political spinmeisters.

Since no movie that sets out with such noble intentions can really be subtle, the performances are just the sort of exaggerations we’re expecting. Costner goes silly as the lovable loser. Grammer gives us a president obsessed with national security. Hopper, in a rather powerful scene, gives us a candidate who is so committed to winning that he’s willing to sacrifice his relationship with his wife.

While the movie strains credulity, there is one scene that is pitch-perfect, capturing the frustration of so many Americans in this world of left-right partisan brinkmanship. Molly has charged herself with answering all of Bud’s mail, now flowing in from Americans - thousands and thousands of other schmucks - who are all pleading with him to choose the candidate who will help them. One day over breakfast, she tries to tell her dad about the power he wields, about all the issues he needs to learn something about to understand the struggles of these strangers.

But Bud yells back at her, partly out of embarrassment and partly out of apathy. He wants to talk about something else.

There are a great many people in places like New Mexico who, even during this election year, have completely shut down when it comes to politics. They are sick of being lumped into one political camp, sick of being taken for granted by politicians and subjected to vicious bickering on the cable news channels, rather than being seen as Americans who don’t fall down on only one side of an issue, and who don’t care about only a single issue.

It’s easier for Bud, and so many others, to simply tune out the bickering. What Molly teaches Bud, and what "Swing Vote" strives to understand, is that politics is important. It actually means something. It doesn’t need to look and sound as it does today. Talking about these things is important, and the more we collectively talk about it with our leaders, the more things will change. The victory here is not that Bud becomes a star, but that Bud once again learns how to care about the process.

3 out of 4